“Bag me a few pieces, and I’ll let Hilary look at them,” Mark told her.
“Right.” Jenny inched a little farther away from the students and asked under her breath, “What did the detectives say?”
“They’ll send for the Christ figure. That should keep it safe. As for everything else….” He snorted. “They listened more or less politely, and agreed that artifact forgery is a likely motive for Nathan’s murder, but what they’re going to be able to do I don’t know. They barely managed to wedge us in before they got involved in a shoot-out.”
Jenny’s eyes widened. “Just like on the telly, eh?”
“Afraid so….” Mark turned.
Amy was hovering expectantly. “I found some old beer bottles.”
“Great!” Mark went to deal with both girl and bottles, thinking how gawky was the former compared to Hilary, and how uninspiring the latter compared to the Cross. The afternoon progressed and the trench expanded, the students working with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Osborne dozed in the afternoon sun. The carpenter never returned from lunch.
Although Mark lingered to take photographs after everyone else had left, Jenny didn’t ask him in for tea. As he drove away, he saw her petting Graymalkin on the back porch, gazing up at Osborne’s topmost turret like a sapper planning how to bring down the walls of a fortress.
That evening Mark had Hilary over for hamburgers, cooking the meat patties on a tiny hibachi beneath Lucia’s oak tree and feeling disconcertingly domestic. Hilary sat on the bench encircling the tree trunk and considered the ceramic scraps. “As far as I can tell without a microscope, Jenny’s right. This is a fragment of a Meissen figurine. This one is from a Royal Worcester teacup. This one is Wedgewood, I think—a pity it burned, I can’t tell what kind of glaze it had.”
“That leaflet about Osborne said the house was once full of ‘vases, decorative pieces, and tableware’.”
“Maybe Dolores was storing some of the old-fashioned pieces in the garage workshop and they were destroyed in the fire. Maybe they were broken and she was having them mended. Although my mother sends her Staffordshire to an expert restorer.”
Mark flipped a hamburger and sprinkled pepper on it. “I’ll ask Preston to ferret out the reports on the fire—that should give us an idea of what was destroyed.”
“Funny how it’s never occurred to us to simply ask Dolores.” Hilary replaced the fragments in their bags and went to get the buns and relishes.
They did not conclude the evening in Mark’s brass bed. He went there alone, to dream fitfully of Rosalind Zapata playing Rambo.
*
Wednesday morning dawned tentatively. Mist gathered around Osborne House as though the mansion were veiling its face in shame. Mark took his suit and tie to work and at eleven used Jenny’s bedroom—not without a glance or two at the bed—to change. Graymalkin watched him so clinically, he wondered if she were envisioning him as a main dish garnished with catnip.
At eleven-thirty Hilary picked up both Mark and Jenny and drove to Temple Ahavoth Shalom for Nathan’s funeral. The grim silence in the car was broken only by Hilary reporting that Leslie had taken the ivory figurine downtown, where it was now safe in the police strongroom. “The genuine figure,” she added. “I checked it before I gave it to her.”
The temple was scented not by funeral wreaths but by the acrid odor of fear. Jenny sat, head bowed, hands twisting in her lap. It wouldn’t do any good to reach across and separate those nervous fingers, Mark told himself; she wanted to think Nathan’s death was somehow her fault.
He looked around at Hilary, pale and composed in her tasteful dark dress, and resisted the impulse to leap from his seat and scream in frustration. It was like having yeast fermenting inside his gut, fed by fear and anger, a head of irritation foaming in the back of his throat.
Bradshaw, the Coburgs, and the museum contingent displayed suitably sober expressions. Nathan’s father and sisters looked stunned. The rabbi delivered an inspired but not, under the circumstances, inspiring eulogy. The service was a reproach, to the killer and to those who by ignorance or design had empowered him. Her, Mark thought. Maybe her.
The day had cleared and grown hot while they were inside. At Osborne the students were stripped to tank tops and shorts. Hilary muttered, “See you later,” and returned to the Lloyd. Preston handed the reins of the dig back to Jenny. Mark changed back into his jeans and T-shirt.
That afternoon the students at the garden trench reached bedrock, and Mark started them on a fourth trench in the debris. In the third trench, Hong found a Franklin Roosevelt campaign button, which, Mark pointed out, might explain the cache of beer bottles Amy had found yesterday. The students replied with blank looks. Sighing, he explained about Roosevelt and the repeal of Prohibition. Prohibition? the students asked. No beer? Major bummer.
Jenny, every movement sharp and meticulous, continued peeling away the stratum of dirt over the ruins of the garage. Mark cleared as much of the floor that had so far emerged. Beneath the shards the concrete was stained with soot; the ceramics had broken during the fire, perhaps by falling off a collapsing shelf.
Methodically Mark recorded every fragment. The late afternoon sun was pouring honey through the trees, repeating the effect of the Tiffany turret, when he waved goodbye to Preston and carried the shards inside.
Jenny was already seated at the computer, entering the position and type of each fragment, Graymalkin reposing helpfully on a stack of printouts next to the white box of the nursery monitor. “Curiouser and curiouser,” Jenny said. “No shelves—no traces of wood or metal. And look at the distribution pattern of the pieces. The objects fell not from above but from the side.”
“Someone threw them,” Mark said.
“Exactly. From the direction of the outer door, I think.” She indicated the photograph of Arthur and Felicia and the rose bushes. Behind them was the complete garage/carriage house, the large doors for vehicles flanked by a smaller one. “And they were all thrown at the same time. See how the different pieces are mixed together and how the burn marks correspond? I’d say the Coburgs were using the garage as a rubbish tip, except that these pieces are much too dear to bung about. If Dolores didn’t want them, she could’ve sold them for a packet.”
“Maybe little Sharon had a temper tantrum and smashed them…. No, she’d hardly have been standing in the doorway as the garage was burning. And Dolores and the kids were out of town that night, weren’t they?”
“So Arthur testified,” Jenny said. Mark knew that if he touched her shoulder, she, too, would be electrically charged.
He didn’t. In the bedroom he found his suit jacket crumpled on the floor. Since it was adorned with various gray hairs, it had probably had feline help in jumping off its hanger. He picked it up and shook it out.
The back door opened. Hilary’s voice called, “Anybody home?”
“Hello, Hilary,” Jenny replied. “Come in.”
“Is Mark here?” The door shut, and footsteps crossed the floor.
Mark smoothed the jacket over its hanger. His “Hi!” was covered by Jenny’s flat, “He’s collecting his clothes in the bedroom.” She could’ve said that some other way, Mark thought.
Pottery shards clinked. “Wow,” said Hilary, without enthusiasm. “Sevres. Old Sevres—this style was discontinued around the turn of the century. Arthur started his collection back when antique porcelain was a bargain. Did he ever mention it in his notebook?”
“I don’t know,” Jenny replied. “I never read his notebook. Too squeamish, to tell the truth.”
“Afraid he’d say something unflattering about your mother?”
“Quite. But now I must read it. I asked Jacob Sikora for it after the funeral. He said he’d look for it among Nathan’s things.”
Mark hung the jacket back on the doorknob. The women’s voices chafed against each other, a reminder of Nathan’s funeral coming altogether too close upon a reminder of Mark’s—well, Hilary would call it infidelit
y.
Jenny continued, “Mr. Sikora also said he would recommend a lawyer, if Mark or I need a defense. But I don’t see that we do.”
Jenny, Mark thought exasperatedly, are you trying to provoke a scene?
Hilary’s acerbic voice said, “Fortunate, isn’t it, that you were…” She paused, then concluded, “…with Mark.”
The gap could’ve been filled with a clinical term or a euphemism, but Mark knew she was thinking something bluntly four-lettered. He backed against the dresser. If he walked into the kitchen now, he’d be as welcome as a Klan member at a “Juneteenth” Emancipation Day picnic.
“Fortunate, yes,” replied Jenny. “He’s a good man.”
“So you just helped yourself?”
“I asked. He accepted. Nothing wrong with that.”
“How could you?”
“How could I ask, or how could I enjoy what I got? Come off it, Miss Prim and Proper.”
Mark recoiled. In the kitchen a chair scraped. Maybe Hilary was preparing to smash it over Jenny’s head. “If all you wanted was cheap sex, you should’ve taken on Kenneth—he was eager enough.”
“I wanted a man, not a chipmunk. And nothing cheap. Besides, Kenneth’s my brother, isn’t he? For my sins.”
“No, not for yours, for your parents’. We’re always paying for our parents’ sins.”
The silence stretched out longer and longer until at last Jenny said, “I’m sorry. That ‘prim and proper’ remark was uncalled for. Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Something happened to you, and you’re still hurting.”
Hilary told her, in more explicit terms than she had ever used with Mark. Her voice was compressed tightly between her teeth, damming a torrent of anguish. Mark clutched the edge of the dresser, sickened.
“And the berk’s in prison now?” Jenny asked, her tone indicating that prison was too good for him. “Good show. I hope they’re sweating the addictions out of him.”
“I used to feel sorry for Ben—never able to keep a job, always gambling and boozing and bragging, trying to fill up what must’ve been a hole inside him the size of the Grand Canyon. My father would make him grovel every time he asked for a loan. He wanted someone to notice him, or some situation he could control, or simply someone to pick on. But he picked on me, and I don’t feel sorry for him any more. Sure, he was a victim, but he didn’t have to victimize me. He had choices.”
“And he made the wrong ones.” Jenny’s voice was tired, as though strained through a colander. “I once had a lover who would come home drunk and beat me. He kept saying I made him do it. I kept trying to please him.”
“You?” Hilary asked, her inflection adding, Competent, confident, you?
Jenny? thought Mark incredulously. God, abuse was epidemic.
“The relationship ended with me in hospital,” Jenny continued. “For years I hated myself for letting that sod have his way with me.”
“And you still like sex?”
“Now I know what makes it good, don’t I?”
Jenny’s ex-lover sounded like a prime candidate for staking out on a fire ant mound. Mark eyed her bed, honored to have come up to her standards.
“Supposedly,” Jenny went on, “women who grow up without fathers can have serious problems with relationships. I literally had no father. Sharon Ward had him more than I did, but he was, I understand, much more intent on his books and movies, his collections and his investments, than on his family. Children were woman’s work. The traditional family man, eh?”
“Like my father? He always said providing lavishly for us was much more important than being there. Why do men think that masculinity is defined by selfish arrogance?”
“And that sex means power, not love?”
Mark paced the length of the bedroom and back. They’d forgotten him; the confrontation had become a feminine seminar on the evil that men do.
Jenny sighed. “I never intended to come between you and Mark, Hilary. As I said, he’s a good man. He cares for you. He’s worth caring for. Take off the chastity belt and enjoy him.”
“I’m trying. But I didn’t put that belt on.”
“You’re letting Ben keep the key? Why should he make your choices?”
“No!” Hilary’s voice cracked.
“Steady on,” Jenny said soothingly.
In another moment they’d gang up on him. Mark envisioned himself tucked inside one of the collection bags and labeled “Politically Correct Male.” He strode out of the bedroom.
Hilary sat crouched over one end of the table, fists clenched. Jenny was slumped before the computer with her eyes closed. Graymalkin sat between them like a referee at a prize fight. “If y’all raise my consciousness any farther,” Mark said, “I’m going to get a nosebleed.”
All three faces looked up at him; Hilary with a wry smile, Jenny with a rueful nod, Graymalkin with a whiskery smirk.
Jenny had deliberately provoked the confrontation, Mark realized, to clear the air. Now if she could only clear away all the other thunderheads that loomed over Osborne House. He was opening his mouth to say something not self-deprecating but conciliatory, when the monitor on the table emitted a slow, thumping noise.
Instantly Jenny was on it, turning up the volume. Footsteps.
The gears of Mark’s mind clashed. Yesterday Zapata had asked whether the Osborne ghosts were really supernatural. This was a chance to show her. This was a chance to show something about masculinity, although he wasn’t quite sure what. “It’s Vicky,” he said. “Come on, let’s get her.”
They burst through the connecting door and into the dining room, Mark at point, Jenny at his right, Hilary at his left. Even though it was still light outside, the heavy curtains darkened the rooms to a gloom that wasn’t opaque but illusory, making shadows dense and objects transparent. The clock was ticking sonorously, almost smugly, in the front hall. “You haven’t wound it?” Mark asked Jenny.
“Not once.”
“Look,” gasped Hilary.
A pallid figure moved in the darkness at the top of the stairs. Long skirts swirled and a feather topped bonnet nodded soundlessly. The dress had the high collar, snug bodice, and puffed sleeves of the late nineteenth century. The gray face had the smeared, distorted features of an image in a nightmare.
Damn her for plaguing the little boy Mark had been with such nightmares. Damn her for snaring him in this evil adult dream. Swearing—and not in French—he charged up the stairs toward the ghostly shape. Behind him came the women, either protesting or urging him on, he wasn’t sure.
The figure whisked into a doorway. The door was shut. She had gone right through the wood panels…. Get a grip, Mark told himself. She had simply shut the door behind her. He fumbled for the knob. It was locked.
“The attics,” said Jenny, digging frantically in her pocket. “There’s no way out. Here, here’s the key.”
Mark jammed the spindly, old-fashioned key in the lock. It didn’t connect with a key on the other side. The door opened so abruptly, it crashed back against the wall, the noise reverberating through the depths of the house. Mark, Jenny, and Hilary stampeded up the stairs. Rays of sun slanted like searchlights across a long, low room, alive with dust motes. Outside of the dazzling light the rest of the room seemed pitch-dark. Mark barely avoided knocking himself silly on an exposed ceiling beam.
In a tight, nervous knot, they searched the attic rooms and found nothing but a few decrepit boxes and trunks, tops yawning. At last they trudged back to the second story and locked the door behind them. Nothing found, nothing proved.
And maybe, Mark told himself with a deep breath, it wasn’t too smart to go chasing a mysterious figure, be it Coburg or Carpathian vampire or urban criminal, that might be armed with a bowie knife. But if Vicky had been carrying such a weapon, he couldn’t see where: the worst she could have done was bop him with her tiny ruffled purse.
Hilary and Jenny shared a glance. The first time someone makes a crack about testosterone, Mark thought irascibly,
I’m going to forget I’m a gentleman. They’d been uncharacteristically docile about letting him take the lead. He’d always suspected female conspiracies, mothers lecturing daughters, “Keep his ego stroked, dear, he’ll be much easier to manage.”
Jenny lingered for a moment in the study doorway, her hands clutching the frame, peering into the dusky room. If Vicky had made her appearance, why not Arthur? Yet Mark’s exacerbated nerves sensed nothing but silence and the indifference of dust. Beside him Hilary asked, “If you could speak to your father, Jenny, what would you tell him?”
In the semidarkness Jenny’s face was unreadable, her eyes shadows as elusive as those thronging the house. “I’d tell him to bugger off, get out of my life, leave me be.”
Neither Mark nor Hilary had any reply to that. They walked downstairs and into the kitchen, and reclaimed banality by phoning for a pizza.
Chapter Eighteen
Thursday morning Hilary went so far as to look up illustrations of chastity belts in the Lloyd library. She cringed—barbaric items—and tried more visualization therapy; Mark unlocked the vicious metal contraption, disintegrated it with a touch of his magic fingers, and swept her into a passionate embrace, free at last.
Bemusedly she went down to the lab to continue packing the collection of beautifully crafted lies. Maybe the polyurethane nests and unbleached muslin wrappings she was preparing so carefully would in the end be used to ship the real artifacts home. But the real artifacts could be anywhere in the world now, damn it.
At least the confrontation last night had cleared the air a bit. Of all the problems Jenny faced, the one she’d inadvertently caused between Mark and Hilary was the best defined. Hilary wasn’t surprised she would charge at it, bugles blaring and banners flying. As for Mark, she knew why he had charged the ghost. He’d been haunted by Osborne all his life; to have Vicky appear just when Hilary and Jenny seemed to be closing ranks against him must’ve been supremely irritating. Hilary smiled—he’d come into the kitchen looking at the women as though they were creatures from another planet, bizarre estrogen-based life forms.
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