Sticks & Scones gbcm-10

by Diane Mott Davidson

At that moment, the lights in the kitchen and dining room went out. In the hazy light cast by the hall sconces, I could see only the silhouette of another human form, holding a glinting sword aloft. I heard two people grunting, fighting, pushing furniture over, whacking each other, shouting whenever they were hit.

  Time to scram, my brain screamed, and I obeyed. I shoved the precious jam jar in my sweater pocket, pushed blindly forward, fell onto the dining-room table, then scrambled upright, knocking over a chair. The combatants in the kitchen barged into something. The crash of exploding glass shattered the darkness.

  Run, I ordered my frozen legs. I groped out in the darkness; my knuckles whacked the china cupboard. Where was the door to the dining room? Run. I stumbled forward.

  Someone was in the dining room with me. A sword slashed the air, with the sound of a cold wind. I screamed and reached out again. My hand closed around something - one of Eliot’s wine bottles. Again the rapier hissed, this time closer. I whirled and parried hard with the bottle. It broke as it smashed on my attacker’s shoulder. Whoever it was went reeling backward.

  I had seconds to move. I stumbled. Found the edge of the dining-room door. Slipped through and ran for my life.

  Down the hall, into the well tower, past the well and garderobe, into the spacious living room. Run, Run, Run, my mind screamed. The cell phone and jar of stamps I bobbled around in my sweater pocket. I was still clutching the neck of the broken bottle. It would be little use against a sword. I had to get away from that slashing weapon, had to get out of the castle, had to escape.

  Behind me, footsteps pounded. Whoever it was could move, I’d give ‘em that. Run, I told myself. Run faster. I slammed through the glass doors to the gatehouse, punched the code into the security keypad, and waited I for the portcullis to rise. Panting, I grabbed the front door.

  Behind me, there were no more footsteps. Had whoever it was given up? Or had my attacker gone to get a confederate? I stared at the front door, wheezing. What next? It was cold outside, and I had no car keys. I had no car: What was I going to do - run all the way into town? Whoever was chasing me was in much better shape than I could ever hope to be.

  I whirled and looked across the courtyard. Just a couple of hundred feet away were parents who could help. Should I chance it? Or should I run out into the night, over the causeway spanning the moat?

  Indecision is the enemy of mortality. Overhead, there was a clunk. Without warning, a splash of boiling liquid bit into my skin. I screamed as pain flared from my shoulder to my elbow. I jumped out of the way of the steaming cascade.

  “Help!” I yelled as I jumped aside. More boiling water poured implacably down. “Help!”

  The water was coming through the arched ceiling, through the ancient murder holes. My elbow and left arm were alive with agony. From the floor above came a woman’s scream. I looked up and saw blond hair, a pretty child’s face. Then I heard a thwack, and another, followed by more struggling and crashing. I was shaking, trying to open the front gatehouse door. My skin was on fire. I couldn’t turn the knob.

  “Flee, cook!” a child’s voice hollered over the din above me. “Flee!” There was the sound of whacking, followed by grunts. “We tried to warn you not to come!”

  And so I ran, back the way I’d come, my arm on fire, my skin melting. Dear God, I prayed, help me.

  And then, like a miracle, I had a vision of pulling Sukie to the sink when she’d burned her hands trying to rescue the scorched coffee cake. Water. Cold water:

  I was slowing down. Could my attacker have made it back to the kitchen? I was going to faint. I was going to die from my burns. I’d never see Arch or Tom or Julian again.

  I was sobbing now. My body was a current of liquid fear and pain. Water. The top of the well was sealed tight with canvas. Water. I was going to die if I didn’t find it. I unbolted the seat to the garderobe, yanked it up, and scrambled up on the ledge. Then I dropped feet first, down, down, down the latrine shaft. My feet whacked a grille and it gave way.

  The shock of the icy moat was such an instant relief that I shouted with joy - underwater. I was rewarded with a choking lungful of creek water. Heaving and gasping, I flailed my way to the surface. Just as I thought Grab the cell phone and jar of stamps, I felt them fall away from my sweater pocket and drop, along with my shoes, deep into the dark water.

  My head bumped against something and I recoiled. A duck? A fish? A rat? What else was there in this damn moat? I blinked, moved my arms and legs, and shoved through the icy water. The spotlights from the castle revealed what I’d bumped into. The missing sorbet carton.

  Huh? Swim. Suddenly I was so deathly cold I knew I was going to sink to the bottom. Swim, paddle, kick, do some damn thing, I commanded myself. And, miraculously, my body obeyed. A hundred feet away, I could see the edge of the moat. A swimming-pool length. No sweat. I lunged through the water. Swim. Kick. Move your arms.

  My scalded arm was numb with pain. My feet felt bruised from crashing through the grille. When I reached the side, what was I going to do? Was someone still after me? Wet and chilled to the bone, how would I get through the dark woods that surrounded the castle? I didn’t have a clue.

  Swim, dammit. I raised one arm, then the other. The burnt arm wouldn’t obey my mind’s commands, so with great effort, I turned on my side and started an awkward, slow side-stroke. I gasped for breath. Swimming had never been so hard.

  Finally, my fingers touched the slimy moat rim. The slippery rock wall, covered with algae, gave me no footing. Wheezing, I grabbed an overhanging aspen branch, only to slide backward into the icy water, gasping. With a huge effort, I hauled myself up on the rocks. One foot in front of the other: Get out of the water; get through the woods, go back to town. Call Boyd. Call the police. Get a grip.

  Flee.

  I heaved myself over the rock wall and tumbled hard into a bank of snow and leaves. All around, unseen trees rattled and swayed. I couldn’t feel my feet. But I was in snow, I knew that. My burning skin began to sweat and scream with pain.

  I glanced back at the castle. The kitchen was lit by an eerie glow that did not come from the sconces or chandeliers. I squinted: There was a figure, a small figure, beside the window, which was once again open. Who was it?

  I’d heard a child yell, “Flee, cook!” It had sounded like a girl, and she’d been in Michaela’s overhead rooms, by the murder holes. I peered at the figure, which stood motionless, framed by the open window. Was I dreaming, or was it a young boy wearing a ruff? None of the kids at the fencing banquet had been sporting one of those stiff Elizabethan collars.

  Crap, I thought. Either I’m seeing a ghost or I’m losing my mind.

  -27-

  I turned away from the castle and tried to get oriented. Close by, light from a solitary lamp shone through the pines. I sniffed a putrid smell. Coming from… what? I steadied myself, knelt carefully, and whisked soothing snow up my left arm. I belatedly recalled hungry mountain cougars, who did their hunting at night. Was I soon to become a feline hors d’oeuvre? I laughed aloud. Put that worry out of your head, dummy. The human hunter who stalked me was far more dangerous than any four-footed ones who might prowl through these woods.

  I staggered to my feet, almost overwhelmed by the smell of… garbage. Suddenly I realized I stood about half a dozen yards from the castle Dumpster, and the light beside it. I needed to get to help, I knew that. But all my thinking of the evening had not brought resolution to the questions that kept cropping up. When I was very young, my mother’s first act whenever she came home from shopping was to check the garbage. This was especially true if I looked guilty. Had I broken a glass? Burned a pan with popcorn? Eaten forbidden ice cream bars? All the evidence my mother ever needed was in the trash.

  I stumbled through the snow and threw open the top to the trash bin. Inside were my tied bags of trash from the labyrinth lunch. I leaned in, snatched them, and tossed them aside. Beneath those bags were two more black garbage bags, tied with yellow plastic r
ibbons. I ripped into the first one and was rewarded with household trash: aluminum platters and sauce-splattered folding boxes from Chinese carry-out. I leaned out of the bin and took a couple of deep, cleansing breaths.

  I heaved myself back up the side of the bin and savagely tore into the final bag. Paint cans. Brushes. And below them, a metal sign and what looked like metal attached to a bunch of wires. I grabbed both, pulled them up, and held them to the light.

  The sign said: PUMP ROOM! HIGH VOLTAGE! DO NOT ENTER! DANGER - ELECTRIC SHOCK! The other was an electric lock, complete with dangling wires. One side was blackened.

  “Andy!” I gasped. “You got yourself into a real mess, didn’t you, kid?”

  I dropped the lock and the chain back into the trash, and tried to figure out where to go. A small service road ran up to the Dumpster. It was slick with ice, but traveling along it would bring me back to the driveway. Think, I ordered myself.

  But I couldn’t think: my burned skin felt so hot I flung myself back into the snow. I felt dizzy, swimming against the movement of the earth.

  After a few moments, I felt a bit better. I blinked. The blur in my vision had cleared. So what did I need to do? Pretend you’re Dorothy and follow the Yellow Brick Road. Or in this case, the Iced Service Road. My own spontaneous, halfhearted chuckle surprised me. Humor in despair. I heaved myself to my feet and lurched forward.

  How far was I from the driveway? A quarter of a mile? Half a mile? Overhead, through the swaying branches, I could just make out the Big Dipper, pointing to the North Star, at the end of the Little Dipper. You can do this. Flee, I told myself.

  And I did, clutching my pained left arm. My stockinged feet had turned numb in the snow. I was going to make it, I told myself. Half a mile at the most.

  The pine boughs swayed and creaked. Who had done this to me? The answer remained tantalizingly elusive: someone in the Great Hall, someone who saw me read Eliot’s pamphlet, perhaps, someone who had followed me to the chapel and watched from afar as I’d scraped the new paint off the incriminating arc, the arc of electricity made where a young man had been electrocuted. Had it been Michaela? And if so, who had attacked her and rescued me? What had really happened back there?

  My mind spun: Flee, cook! We tried to warn you not to come! I’d looked up into a face, with blond hair.

  Andy had broken into a playroom, a playroom guarded by an electrified lock. I don’t hate him, Michaela had said. Quite the opposite … The electric-locked playroom had been cheaply furnished, and the toys had been old, but not covered with dust.

  The only dangerous place in the castle is the moat pump room, Sukie had said. But don’t worry, it’s all locked up. Was the room without a pump truly dangerous? Or was it locked to keep Our Lady Swiss-Clean out?

  Tonight, I’d seen the face of a child, a little girl, I was almost sure. I was almost sure I’d heard that girl attacking my attacker, up in Michaela’s apartment.

  There was a child-a living, nonghostly little girl - in Hyde Castle.

  The rumor of the baby drowning in the well had been just that: a rumor, started in a deliberate attempt to ward off the curious. And what about the screaming in Hyde Chapel? There hadn’t been any ghost of a dead wife, I realized. The real child had been crying; maybe she had been hiding in the chapel storeroom when the ill-fated wedding had started. Eliot could have put together his whole tape-and-player show to cover up for it.

  So Eliot had to know. He had to know something. He had to know why and how Andy had been electrocuted. Did he also know who had murdered Andy? Or had Eliot murdered Andy?

  I was nearing the driveway. I had to be. But I couldn’t hear cars from the state highway, only the moaning of the trees. Of course Eliot knew. Poor Andy had broken into the chapel - not the chapel where the stamps were hidden, but the castle chapel where the child was hidden, in its playroom… behind an electric lock and a sign saying that it was a pump room, to keep Sukie out.

  But whose child… ?

  Stories in town had him living like a hermit in one room of the castle.

  For how long had Eliot lived like that? From the time he lost his teaching position on the East Coast to the time he met Sukie, almost nine years had passed. He’d had at least one girlfriend during that time: Viv Martini. That relationship hadn’t lasted long, according to Boyd.

  The family of the original fencing-master; meanwhile, had been given permission to live in a section of the castle rent-free …

  Uh-huh. Almost nine years in a desolate, falling-down castle was a long time. Before his relationship with Viv, I was willing to bet, Eliot had found solace in the arms of his caretaker.

  I don’t hate Eliot … quite the opposite.

  I was also willing to bet Michaela had had a child she wouldn’t give up, but whose existence had to be kept secret, if Eliot was going to realize his dreams for the castle, with his reputation intact. The child, I wagered, occasionally wandered away from her playroom and made sudden appearances around the castle, perhaps even wearing a miniature suit of armor. Perhaps it was one of those appearances that had somehow provoked the nasty falling-out between Eliot and Michaela I’d witnessed in the courtyard…

  Not only that, but the news of Andy Balachek’s murder had brought the hard glare of publicity to the castle, a glare that might very well reveal a desperate secret that would undo all the owner’s ambitious plans.

  The child. I’d heard her breathing … that night I’d stood in the drum tower by our room. I’d glimpsed her once, in the shadows of the Great Hall, wearing her little suit of armor, undoubtedly lured by the fencing demonstration my own son was putting on. Even Tom had seen her, but had put it down to hallucinogenic drugs. This curious child, I was willing to wager, could get around the castle through the unrenovated areas, climb up into the towers, and scare us with unexpected appearances… .

  Flee, cook! We tried to warn you!

  I stumbled down the service road, my thoughts spinning. After what seemed like an eternity, my ears made out another sound, a roaring noise… the creek. I thanked God. And when had I heard another roaring noise? Not long ago.

  We tried to warn you… .

  I lurched to the driveway, and saw the lights of a distant vehicle. Was it on the road? I tripped on the snow-covered ground and fell to my knees. A wave of nausea rolled over me.

  What had Boyd said? The bullet that hit your house was not from the gun that shot Andy, Tom, and “Morris Hart,” the computer thief… The bullet was a warning. Somebody had tried to warn not Tom, but me. Away from what? From catering at Hyde Chapel. From catering at Hyde Castle. Why? Because a murder had been committed in the castle, and the body had been dumped not fifty feet from the doors of Hyde Chapel.

  Who lived in that upstairs apartment where the child’s voice had come from? Michaela. Michaela who loved children, Michaela who had her own child, I was almost sure. Michaela had tried to warn me away by shooting out our window. Scare her; she must have thought, close down the catering business for a while, anything to keep the mother of one of my favorite fencers away from this place where Andy died I walked forward. I stayed in the shadows, knowing the person who’d perpetrated these crimes, who’d struck at me with a sword and poured boiling water onto my arm, was probably still searching for me.

  And who was that person? Who had access to both the castle and Hyde Chapel? Who knew about the Lauderdales’ demand for sorbet for their son, and could ensure my return to the kitchen by tossing the first carton into the moat?

  As soon as I started to dig through the pamphlets, and started to unravel the lethal web spun through the castle and its history, somebody had gotten very scared.

  Who had access to Tom’s return time from New Jersey? The only way to get that was to have access to our family’s private doings… through Tom, through me … or through Arch. Whom did Arch visit every week? His father. And who had latched onto John Richard of late, convinced him, I was willing to wager, to fence some stamps and use his doctor-status and r
eal estate greed to buy an expensive town house? No doubt she’d also figured she’d be able to follow our every move while planning her disposal of millions of dollars’ worth of stolen stamps.

  The roar of an approaching van interrupted my thoughts. My van. Tom! I waved at him with my good arm. He braked, jumped out, and insisted on helping me into the passenger seat. Relief and love for him overwhelmed me.

  “Miss G., look at you!” His face was wracked with worry. “You’re all wet! How did you ever - “

  “Listen, Tom,” I interrupted him, shivering like a madwoman. “You need to arrest Viv Martini.”

  -28-

  My only question,” said Julian the next night, as he poured bubbling ginger ale into a punch bowl, “is what’s going to happen to Eliot and the castle?” We were in the Elk Park Prep gym, readying for the Valentine’s Day Dance. My left arm, which had received second-degree burns, was bandaged. I was sitting in a chair beside the table, unable to help much beyond dispensing advice, which I did freely.

  Tom was not there yet. I hoped he would come, believed he would come. After all, he’d been willing to accept my rapid explanation of what had transpired at the castle, before he’d found Viv Martini, barely conscious, on the floor beside the murder holes. He’d brought her to her feet, told her her rights, and cuffed her. When a parent had offered to drive me to the hospital emergency room, it had been my great pleasure to see a defeated Viv being guarded by Tom in my van, where they were waiting for police cars to show up.

  My mind turned back to Julian’s question: What was going to happen to Eliot? I didn’t know. He’d had to tell first the cops, and then Sukie, who had been oblivious to his hidden life, the truth: that Andy Balachek had climbed through the west-side garderobe into the study. That Balachek had received a nearly lethal charge of electricity trying to break into the castle’s former chapel. That the sudden loss of electricity had brought Michaela to the room, and that she had run to Eliot, working on jams in the kitchen, as was his wont in the wee hours. She had told him of Andy’s comatose state.