Stephanie waited until Quentin’s face unclenched, if only a bit. “Do you know where Dylan is now?”
“No. I tried to call him, but he’s not picking up. I tried Rachel, and she’s gone to her dad’s place and hasn’t seen him either.”
Jean visualized Matt patting Rachel on the shoulder the way Hugh had patted her.
“Were your parents all right with Dylan seeing Rachel?” Stephanie asked.
“You mean with Mom, like, suing Jessica? They’ve got enough going on without doing the whole Montague and Capulet thing.”
“What do they have going on?”
“They’ve gone out a limb with their movie. Lords of the Lie. It’s make or break time, you know?”
“And how does your aunt play into that?”
Jean assumed Quentin meant for the abbreviated strands of his hair to stand up on end. It looked as though he’d been tearing at it. His long chin and hollow cheeks gave him a lean and hungry look, as much psychic as literal.
“Kelly,” Quentin said. “She’s helping them out. She’s making sure they, like, know she’s helping them out.”
“Did your mother and your aunt argue about that tonight?”
“They were always arguing about it.”
“Kelly was helping you out as well,” said Alasdair, “taking you on a tour of the U.K.”
Now Quentin turned toward Alasdair with curiosity, even alarm. “Ah geez, you’re the guy from Scotland.”
“Did you steal the replica Witch Box from Blair Castle?” Stephanie asked.
“No, no, I didn’t—I couldn’t—I wasn’t even there—that’s all a big mistake.” He hid his face with his hand. By this time his shoulders were framing his ears.
The tuck at one side of Alasdair’s mouth acknowledged Quentin’s denial, not just of the theft but of even being present. “Why did you give up your job at The Sunburn and come back to the U.S.?”
“I never had a job with The Sunburn.” Quentin’s voice was muffled, directed into his palm, as if passing on some dark secret. “I had an interview, but they didn’t want to hire an American. Mom and Dad, they, like, embroider stuff.”
Stephanie looked at Jean. Jean looked at Alasdair. Alasdair appealed to the ceiling. No kidding.
“I’ve gotta move back home, Dylan’s already moved back home—he’s got a job at Starbucks and I need to find something.” Quentin looked up and from face to face. “Guys, my mom’s been murdered, my brother, he’s run off somewhere, my aunt’s freaking out, my dad, aw geez, my dad’s acting like he’s gonna punch someone out.”
“Is he prone to violence?” Stephanie asked, and Jean thought, She saw those bruises, too.
Quentin stared, obviously realizing what he’d just said. Licking his lips, he answered, “Well, I mean, he kind of pitches things around, you know, when he’s mad. Like his fist through the wall when Mom wouldn’t . . .”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. It was Dylan who saw it. Really. Don’t ask me.”
“Where did you get those bruises on your wrist?”
“Huh?” He looked down at his own arms as if they were attached to someone else’s body. “Oh. I dunno. Wrestling with Dylan.”
Jean remembered her mother telling her brothers they were acting like wolf pups, the way they communicated by wrestling. They still did, with each other and with their own sons.
“All right,” Stephanie told Quentin. “Go on back to the hotel. If you hear from Dylan, have him call me. Got that? Tomorrow I’ll get formal statements from all of you.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Quentin backpedaled toward the door, then made his escape down the stairs.
“Don’t worry,” Stephanie said to Alasdair, “he’s not going anywhere.”
Instead of pressing his own case—two local murders took precedent over a distant stolen object—Alasdair replied with a firm nod. “We’ll bag him yet. And recover the replica as well.”
“Did they bring it back here with them?” Jean asked. “It’s about the size of a small toaster oven. You could fit it into a large suitcase.”
“Where the metal hinges would show up a treat on airport security scans. A shipping company would do very nicely. For enough money, they could have had it here in the States the day it was nicked. And Kelly’s got money, or so they’re all saying.”
“So is the Box sitting on the Dingwalls’ doorstep in Rosslyn?” asked Jean.
Alasdair repeated incredulously, “Rosslyn?”
“A suburb of D.C. Yeah, they’ve already pointed out how apt it is that they live there.”
Stephanie opened her mouth, apparently thought better of asking for an explanation, and said only, “We’ll keep an eye out for it. Olson?”
“Got it,” he said, making a notation on his page.
“Make sure the Dingwalls have police protection tonight. We can’t be sure someone’s not trying to pick off the whole family.”
“And we’ll grab Dylan if he shows up. Got that, too.” One more time Olson headed for the staircase.
Again voices rose and fell from downstairs. Doors slammed. More voices erupted from beneath the windows, accompanied by flashes of light. Cameras. Newspeople. Not Jean’s inoffensive “journalist” but pack-of-wolves style reporters. Been there, she thought. Done that.
“Someone’s lying.” Alasdair stated the obvious. “I’d not be surprised if all three were lying, about one thing or another. And they all three used the word ‘lynch’”
“ ‘Lynch’ is as good a description as any, with the witchcraft implications—Jessica calling Sharon a witch, Tim calling Jessica a witch . . .” Her voice trailing away into a frustrated growl, Stephanie walked over to the window and gazed down at the media scrum. Car doors slammed. The shouts grew more urgent. An engine started.
“Jessica didn’t call Sharon a witch,” said Jean, “not at the reception, anyway. She said that Sharon was the sort of woman who was accused of being one, because she babbled and slandered and scandalized her neighbors. Or something like that.”
“Jean’s after splitting academic hairs with the best of them,” said Alasdair.
“I should hope so,” Jean told him.
“Whatever,” said Stephanie. “It’s not sufficient cause for a defamation of character suit. Although when you have criminals suing homeowners for defending themselves during a break-in . . .”
Jean spoke before Alasdair’s indignant expression became critical words. “I’ve been wondering all along if the suit’s not just the tip of the iceberg. I suspect they’re quarreling over a letter, an inventory, something about the history of the charm stone and where it is now. Jessica’s supposedly got a new source that ties in with Bacon’s Rebellion, but while that’s the right time period, that’s not her field. I don’t know. My brain hurts.”
“Yeah. The old gray matter is taking quite a beating.” Stephanie rubbed her hands over her face and through her hair, then stretched like a cat. “Why don’t you guys call it quits? For now.”
Reminding herself not to let that grating “you guys” set her teeth any further on edge than they already were, Jean hauled herself to her feet. She managed not to groan from the effort of straightening her spine. Her desperation had drained away to a dull stubbornness. This was Stephanie’s case. Alasdair could indeed call it quits. For now.
He got to his feet and methodically rotated first his shoulders and then his head. He flicked a quick, distracted smile in Jean’s direction, but by the time she returned it, he was on his way to the window to stand beside Stephanie. Quits? Alasdair?
The commotion had died away below. No doubt the police and security between them had removed the three Dingwalls to the Woodlands.
“Well done,” Alasdair said.
Stephanie’s laugh was more of a raspberry. “Yeah, right. Tell me that when I’ve got Sharon’s killer behind bars. And Wesley Hagedorn’s, if it turns out to be two different people. And Hagedorn’s thief, for that matter.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Jean thought of Wes’s photos and diagrams, stolen along with some valuables. Right now she would reject gold, silver, actual paper money, in favor of valuables like peace and quiet. And the soothing properties of chocolate on dyspepsia that was more mental than physical. There were packets of cocoa in the pantry at their house. There was hot water in the bathroom. There were crisp sheets on the bed.
Lobbing a loud “Good night” at Stephanie and Alasdair both, Jean sidled toward the door.
Chapter Seventeen
Responding, thank goodness, to his cue, Alasdair also exchanged a good night with Stephanie. By the time he’d joined Jean in her headlong trudge toward a time-out, the American detective was playing another number on her cell phone.
“I’ve got your mobile,” Alasdair told Jean as they started down the stairs. He groped in his pocket and handed it over.
Just when Jean removed her hand from the railing to take the phone, her lead-weighted feet snagged on a step. For a moment she and Alasdair clutched and balanced—and there was a metaphor for a relationship if ever there was one.
“Are you all right, lass?”
“I’m just tired,” she replied, opening herself up for a repeat of his, “You had no call haring away like that.”
He said only, “As am I.”
Olson was waiting in the foyer at the foot of the stairs. In the half-light he looked even more like a schoolboy—all he needed was a skateboard under one arm. “This way,” he said, and led them to the back of the building and through the kitchen.
Jean squinted at the abrupt transition from dim light to bright, from eighteenth-century wood and pewter to twenty-first-century stainless steel that was getting yet another polish from the cleaning staff. Then she was blinking at the sudden darkness outside, and at the frigid air, like the gust from an open freezer, while Alasdair made sure Olson locked the back door behind them. “All secure?” he called softly. “There’s a good lad.”
Yeah, so far Williamsburg’s finest were pretty darn fine indeed. Intelligent. Free of chips on shoulders. Compatible, even.
Something in the back of her mind, behind lead shielding thicker and heavier than the cold lead weighting her steps, whispered about honey catching more flies than vinegar.
Together, they picked their way between the tables and over the uneven paving of Chowning’s garden eating area. A thin mist filtered through the overhead arbor and onto Jean’s glasses, so that every light seemed to smear and run. From the gate that opened onto the Courthouse lawn, she looked over at the tree, the hanging tree, to see the tarpaulin-screen had been replaced by yellow police tape. Not the sort of yellow ribbon that indicated a happy homecoming.
A couple of flashlights were witch-lights below the rust-flecked canopy, ghosts unable to rest, demanding if not vengeance, at least justice. She could hear them wailing . . . No, that was just the wind in the branches surging overhead.
Alasdair held the gate open for her, on automatic pilot, she estimated—his gaze was fixed in the middle distance. She could almost see the smoke from his intellectual mills wafting from his ears.
Side-by-side they walked quietly across Duke of Gloucester Street, away from the camera- and microphone-equipped figures camped in the aureole of light at the tavern’s front door. The church was now dark and the street vacant, although a distant shout or two echoed from the light-filled oasis of Merchant’s Square half a mile distant—college kids, probably, taking advantage of Halloween falling on a Saturday night.
Halloween. All Hallows Eve. Samhain, the old Celtic quarter day, the end of the old year, when the gates of the otherworld opened and dark forces walked abroad.
Dark and yet very human forces were walking here, concealed against the dark silhouettes of buildings and trees. Jean peered into the night, but the tiny nebulae of tree-lamps threw out no more light than your average firefly. She increased her pace along the milky way of the crushed shell path, Alasdair crunching a rhythm beside her until they stopped at Francis Street. The dim shape of their own house, sanctuary, stood just beyond the crosswalk. Looking right and left along the ribbon of licorice that was the street, they stepped off the curb.
And something heavier than lead settled on Jean’s shoulders, so that her knees almost buckled. The hair on the back of her neck rose like antennae. Beside her, Alasdair gasped as though he’d been punched in the stomach. As one, they turned toward the ravine where the street fell and rose again, the leaf and branch-clogged hollow where, last night, they’d walked through a pool of dank air scented like an open grave.
In the blackness beneath the trees, something, someone, moved. She wasn’t glowing—despite cartoons and movies, ghosts didn’t glow—but her white apron, her white collar, her white face below a white cap, reflected just enough of the lights radiating from the Inn and the Lodge to define themselves against the gloom.
She was a substantial woman, her jowls, her broad shoulders, the hillock of her chest all drooping toward a protuberant belly. The furrows in her face counted out her years, too many of them for her to be pregnant—she was merely well-fed.
Her eyes were dark holes ripped in the mask of her face, staring unfocused into another world. She held something in her hands, something round, with a tall neck.
The Bellarmine bottle.
Walking slowly and painfully, old or sick or both, she crossed from the north side of the road to the south and disappeared into the underbrush. A gust of wind spattered rain across the pavement, and across Jean’s face, and filled her nose with a thick rich scent—cooking meat, baking bread, spices, sweetness drifting down the air like an angelic chorus—no, the scent was of raw meat, swiftly turning rancid.
The smell vanished just as surely as the ghost. Jean sniffed, sensing nothing but rain on vegetation with an afterglow of exhaust fume.
She only realized Alasdair’s hand was wrapped around her upper arm when it clenched and let go. The quick pain broke through the weight and trickling chill of another dimension. She looked up at his face, ashen in the tentative light. “Did you . . .” she gulped what felt like glue and tried again. “Did you smell the food cooking? And rotting?”
“Oh aye. If our wee house was once a kitchen, then I’m thinking we’ve just met the cook.”
“She was carrying the bottle from the mantelpiece.”
“The witch bottle, to match the Witch Box, eh?”
“But a witch bottle protects against witches, and the Box seems to have been the tool of . . .”
The headlights of a car sent their shadows leaping toward the ravine. They lunged for the opposite curb, and stood watching the lights glare down into the ravine and then up again, illuminating nothing except damp leaves squashed onto the asphalt.
“A tool of the sort of tale-telling and foolishness that leads to murder,” concluded Alasdair. He opened the gate while Jean dug out the key, too tired to argue yet again about the complexities of seeing-as-believing and believing-as-seeing.
The living room lamp they’d left on glowed a welcome through the curtains even if it didn’t light the keyhole. Jean sniffed again, detecting a hint of smoke. Not the sweetish smoke she’d sensed in the house twice now, but the acrid reek of a cigarette. And there was the cigarette itself, a wrinkled filter tip lying on the cement step. “We had a visitor.”
“I don’t see a note.”
“I’ve known ghosts who’ll open and shut locked doors.” Wiping her shoes on the mat, Jean stepped inside, Alasdair wiping and stepping just behind.
Two black-and-white whiskered faces looked up at them from the rag rug.
“Well then,” Alasdair said, “I’ve never known a cat opening a locked door.”
“They must have slipped inside when the housekeeper came to turn down the bed. Hi Bushrod, hey Bucktrout—sorry, I don’t remember which of you is which . . .�
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“I think I’d better let you know that you’re not alone,” said a woman’s voice behind them.
Jean’s heart careened into her throat, knocking her wits from her head. She tried to seize them, but they ran through her mind like sand through her fingers. What the . . .
In slow motion, Alasdair spun around. In even slower motion he seized Jessica Evesdottir by the wrist and hauled her forward onto the rug.
The cats seized the opportunity and made a break for the great outdoors.
Oh, Jean thought. Jessica. She wasn’t a fugitive after all.
Her hair was scooped clumsily back from her face and its silver streak was matted with spray or gel—no doubt she’d been wearing a cap for the play. Her mascara had smeared beneath her eyes, making the slack skin there look like the black sheep’s bags of wool. Her flamingo pink T-shirt reading, “Well-behaved women never make history,” her windbreaker, designer jeans, and high-heeled boots all signaled that the show was over and she was off the interpreter’s clock, free to wear something considerably more assertive than a seventeenth-century goodwife’s garb. And her eyes were hardly downcast and demure. They targeted Alasdair. She wrenched her wrist from his hand. “Great reflexes you’ve got there.”
“How’d you get yourself in here?” he asked, every word a pellet of hail.
“I’m friends with a manager at the Inn. No, I’m not going to give you a name. I don’t want to get anyone into trouble.”
“Then why come here?”
Settling her heart in its usual place and taking a deep breath, Jean forced her feet to carry her over to the door, which she shut against the darkness and rain. When she flipped the nearby switch, the ceiling light filled the room with blessed illumination. Candlelight might be romantic. So might the glow of the small table lamp. Right now romance was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
“I don’t know who I’m less eager to see, the Dingwalls or the media,” Jessica explained. “So I thought I’d hole up here until they all went away and as a public-spirited citizen I could turn myself in to Detective What’s-her-face. Yes, I got her messages. Typical woman in a traditionally male profession, she has to out-tough the tough guys.”
Charm Stone Page 18
