Ashes to Ashes

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “You make it sound as if I let someone in,” Michael replied. “For a’ I ken it was the bogles again, bein’ more creative this time oot.”

  “Sure,” said Eric.

  Michael turned abruptly and stamped into the kitchen— as well as he could stamp in Reeboks.

  “Innocent until proven guilty?” Rebecca suggested to Eric. “Surely it’s our same malefactor. But he— she— would need a key.”

  “The keys are still here,” called Michael. “Is that evidence for or against me, Mr. Expensive Lawyer?”

  The tight line of Eric’s mouth relaxed. He didn’t demand why Rebecca was defending Michael. She wasn’t sure herself, except that she lived in Dun Iain, too. “As long as nothing’s missing I’ll have to assume you’re innocent, won’t I?” he called. And, with a shudder as if something cold had traced his spine, “God, I’ll be glad when all this is over.” He wrapped his arm around Rebecca. “Walk me to the car?”

  He might well be glad when it was over with her, too. He looked, she thought contritely, exhausted. His eyes were brittle smoked glass, the parallel lines between his eyebrows cut deep. And he had to drive back to Columbus. “Would you like to stay here?” she asked. “We have plenty of beds.”

  A sardonic spark lit his eye and winked out. Sure.

  The night was utterly dark, utterly silent except for the dissatisfied mutter of the wind in the trees. On the neutral ground of the parking area Eric and Rebecca kissed with more rue than passion. “I hadn’t intended the evening to end like this,” he told her.

  The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley, Rebecca said to herself. The best laid schemes to get laid, that is. Aloud she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I did either.”

  “Well, now we have our cruise to look forward to.”

  “Yes, we do.” Just keep letting me see those chinks in your shell, she thought. Even for a brief encounter I want a man, not a knight in shining armor. She stood shivering in the cold until the red taillights disappeared into the trees.

  Just as she was locking the door Michael wailed, “Damn and blast!”

  Rebecca wasn’t sure she was capable of caring about anything else tonight. The echoing clarity inside her head was worse than any headache. She looked into the sitting room. “Now what?”

  He held one of his cassettes. The tape spilled from it, tangled around the lamp, the chair, the shelf where the stereo equipment sat. “It’s one o’ my Runrig tapes. You canna get them here!”

  “Oh no! Not the live album, the one with ‘Loch Lomond’ on it?”

  “Aye, that one.” He tried to reel in the tape. It was knotted beyond repair. “Damn,” he moaned, and laid the cassette as reverently down as if it were the mangled body of a pet.

  “I love the way they do ‘Loch Lomond’,” Rebecca protested. “They have such a gestalt going with the audience, the song tarted up into pop-rock and yet with the bloody heart still beating.”

  “Oh aye,” Michael said softly. He glanced around, just long enough for her to glimpse the anguish in his face. For once the psychological warfare, whether perpetrated by man or spirit, had been directed at him.

  “I’m sorry about the tape.”

  He had already turned away. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” She turned, dragged herself up the stairs to her room, and shut the door on the complications of the night.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Rebecca scurried through the rain toward the car. Michael leaned across the seat and opened her door for her. “Did you find Darnley?”

  “Asleep upstairs, intelligent creature. What a day for Louise’s birthday party.”

  “It’s no so bad,” said Michael. He rubbed the fog of his breath off the window. “You should be in Stornoway on a dreich and dreary Sunday, when they’re takin’ their religion like a dose of cod liver oil.”

  “No thank you,” Rebecca told him. She started the car. It stuttered, balked, and crept down the driveway. Rain rattled on the roof and the wheels hissed through puddles. The windshield wipers muttered like Dorothy grumbling about some fancied slight. The house dwindled in the rearview mirror, pouting in the rain, walls colorless and windows blank. Maybe, Rebecca thought without a great deal of hope, Dun Iain will mind its manners while we’re gone.

  “Did Warren ever phone back?” Michael asked.

  “No. What could he have found out? It’s worse than it was last time. Who or what locked you in the storeroom and why didn’t they take anything?”

  “They murdered my tape,” he growled.

  “I daresay that was sheer spite, human or otherwise.”

  “It was no ghost. Someone was in the house wi’ me Friday night.”

  He slumped, his hands in his pockets, his head turned so that Rebecca couldn’t see his face. If she felt like an outsider here, he must feel like an astronaut on an alien planet. “It’s possible that someone else has a house key,” she said. “I don’t believe you locked yourself in, like Eric suggested.”

  “Much obliged,” Michael returned. “I don’t believe you killed the tape. Or came back early and locked the door.”

  “Thanks.” She shot him a dubious glance. If she asked him if he was up to something, he wouldn’t answer.

  Yesterday Michael had been his usual professional self. They’d spent hours struggling to correlate the items unearthed from the storeroom with the inventories, and had at last agreed James had bothered to open only a few of his father’s crates and boxes. Maybe that’s why James was still at Dun Iain. Unfinished business was an accepted motive for haunting.

  The Toyota chugged beneath the overpass and into Putnam, the sound of the rain suddenly stopping and starting again. Rebecca’s hands were so cold on the steering wheel she could hardly feel her fingers. “All right,” she said. “Someone was in the house. It wasn’t Eric.”

  “I’m sure you were right on top of him.”

  Red light. Rebecca hit the brake with a jolt and frowned at Michael’s reflection in the window. “As a matter of fact I wasn’t.”

  “Woman, you’ve a bad influence on my tongue. You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.” But she hadn’t mistaken the quick glint of satisfaction he’d shown when he realized what hadn’t happened Friday night. “You don’t like Eric, therefore I shouldn’t either. Is that it?”

  “It’s the clever ones like us who fall arse over tit for smarmy swine.”

  “What?”

  Michael stretched, his knees colliding with the dashboard, and turned the astringent blue glow of his eyes toward her. “Women have no monopoly on self-delusion. I fooled myself once, right and proper. We clever ones, we’re the ones who fall for gilded weeds. Too unworldly, I suppose.”

  He was comparing Eric to Sheila. “I’m under no illusions about Eric,” Rebecca asserted. “I’ve spent too much of my life already repenting at leisure.” An impatient toot from the car behind jerked her attention back to the traffic light. She accelerated through the intersection.

  Men! she thought. And, just to be fair, added, Women! There she’d been, champagne, king-sized bed, no doubt silk robe, and she’d frozen up. “Okay,” she said, as much to herself as Michael. “Graft is fashionable these days, and Eric has expensive tastes. What if he— as well as half the people in town— is picking up a little extra from Dun Iain?”

  “It depends on what you want from him, doesn’t it?”

  “A good time, some affection, a touch of class. I don’t think I know what I want.”

  “You’re settin’ your standards awful low.”

  “Probably,” Her baleful glare at Michael was deflected by his amused and quite sympathetic gaze. Her resentment shattered into laughter. “How did this conversation get started?”

  Michael shook his head. “Damned if I know, lass.”

  Still laughing, Rebecca turned into the parking lot of Golden Age Village. The Sorensons’ station wagon was just turning out. Peter waved, grinned, pointed toward
the building and mimed hysteria. Michael waved back. Rebecca parked next to the Pruitts’ pickup, two cars away from Eric’s Volvo. The lights in the windows of the sprawling brick building radiated warmth and welcome. When Michael opened the door and bowed her in with a flourish, she punched playfully at his jacket. Darn the man, honey and vinegar weren’t supposed to mix.

  The faint antiseptic smell of the hallway was eased by an aroma of coffee. A banner reading “Happy 100th Birthday Louise” was strung across the door to a large sitting room. People of all ages milled around a long table set with a punch bowl, trays of cookies, and the coffeepot. Jan, wearing her pink volunteer’s blouse, met Rebecca just inside the room. “Nasty out there, isn’t it? You must feel right at home, Michael.”

  “No,” he answered. “Any chance of a cuppa?”

  “I have a pot of tea just for you and Mrs. West. She emigrated from some burg in Scotland lo these many years ago.” Jan steered Michael toward an old woman propped up in a wheelchair, her bright beady eyes fixed hungrily on his sweater. “Here he is,” Jan called, “one bona fide Scot.”

  “How do you do, Mrs West,” said Michael, engulfing the old lady’s shrunken hand in his. Her face lit up with a smile so broad she looked like an advertisement for dentures.

  “Lay it on thick,” Jan whispered. “I’ll keep you fortified with tea.”

  Michael took off his coat and pulled up a chair. “So you’re from God’s country?”

  “Yes indeed,” Mrs West replied. “Glen Lyon.”

  “Perthshire! Ah, bonny airts.”

  The hills of Caledonia, Rebecca thought. Jan guided her back across the room. “There. I made the mistake of telling her about him last month, and she’s been after me to produce him for her.”

  “I’ll bet he doesn’t talk to her like he talks to me.”

  “I hope not.” Mandy, Brian, and a couple of other children went whooping by, right under the legs of an old man with a cane. “Mandy!” Jan called. She said to Rebecca, “Get some more cookies out of the kitchen, would you please?” And she was off after the kids.

  Admiring Jan’s broken field running, Rebecca headed for the kitchenette at the corner of the room and picked up a platter of cookies. “You stay away from him,” said a voice right beside her. She looked around. A second door, open only a crack, led into a hallway. A woman with permed blond hair and a jangling necklace over her pink blouse stood just outside. “He’s no good, I tell you. Stay away from him.”

  “God, Sandra,” said a sharp voice that only with difficulty did Rebecca recognize as Heather Hines’s. “Get off my back.”

  “Don’t you talk to me that way, young lady.”

  “You’re not my mother. You just married my Dad for his money. Leave me alone.” A quick stamp of feet and Rebecca caught a glimpse of Heather’s black-clad form skimming down the hall like a dragonfly.

  With a graphic oath and a jangle Sandra threw open the door and strode through the kitchenette into the sitting room, high heels clicking on the tile. If she saw Rebecca she took no notice. Rebecca was just as glad the woman didn’t know who she was. She shook her head; girls Heather’s age were emotional accidents looking for someone to happen to.

  “Eavesdropping, I see,” said Eric’s voice in Rebecca’s ear.

  “I plead innocent, counselor. Merely a casual witness.”

  He grinned. “Come meet Louise.”

  “Let me put these cookies down.” So, Rebecca thought as she placed the platter on the table, he wasn’t going to turn up that Roman nose at her in retaliation for the awkward scene on Friday. When she’d talked to him on the phone yesterday he’d been perfectly at ease— he’d even tut-tutted about Michael’s tape. But you never could tell with men.

  He tucked her hand beneath his arm and led her across the room. As they passed behind Mrs West’s chair the old lady was saying, “— children from the village sixpence a day to run miles across the moor beating the grouse toward the English shooting parties.”

  “As if you were animals,” said Michael, gesturing with his teacup. “It’s nae better the noo. We’re still used and abused by the wealthy.”

  “Rebecca,” said Eric, “this is Louise O’Donnell.”

  The old woman’s hand felt like a cotton glove filled with baby powder. “You’ve hardly changed at all from your photos!” Rebecca exclaimed. Louise still had a turned up nose and a round face, even though her rosy complexion was now the texture of a dried apple. Her hair, while sparse, was still red. A shade that owed more to artifice than to nature, but then, more power to her. “I think these may be yours,” Rebecca went on, pulling the clay beads out of her purse. “They were behind a brick in the sixth floor fireplace.”

  Louise’s glasses were so thick her eyes were magnified out of proportion, as if she were a sketch by Picasso. “Thank you, dear. I’d forgotten all about those beads. You mean you’re actually digging through Jamie’s scrapbooks?”

  “It’s a real adventure,” Rebecca assured her. “I’m sorry I came too late to meet any of the Forbes family. But that’s archaeology, trying to piece together people’s lives from what they leave behind.”

  Eric seated Rebecca and asked Jan, “Do you need any help?”

  She said, “Peter’s just come back with some more cookies, if you don’t mind going out in the rain with that nice suit.” Eric headed out into the rain, navy-blue suit, striped shirt, cranberry tie, wing tips and all.

  “Isn’t he pretty?” said Louise. “If only I were eighty again.”

  Rebecca laughed and accepted a cup of coffee from Jan. “We were just looking at the photos of Rudolph Gemmell. He was very pretty, too.”

  “Much too pretty for his own good. And for Mrs. Forbes’s.”

  “She seemed so flirtatious in the pictures I’d wondered if John was ever jealous of her. You don’t mean he was jealous of his own butler.”

  Louise nodded sagely. “And with good reason, too.”

  “Really?” Nothing like good, juicy, harmless gossip about people who were dead and gone. History was little more than man’s insatiable taste for gossip, after all.

  “It was so long ago,” Louise said. “I was too young then to understand what was happening. The voices in the night, the steps on the stairs, the stained linens. But I understand now. Mrs. Forbes and Rudolph were lovers.”

  “Well! The butler did it— how about that!” So Elspeth, the stranger in a strange land, had been so lonely she’d taken not an aristocratic neighbor but her servant to her bed. More than one ballad recounted such a story.

  “And the baby!” Louise went on. “I was there all alone with Mrs Forbes when it came, and believe me, that was a very sudden education!”

  Rebecca remembered Prissy in Gone with the Wind: “I don’t know nothing about birthing babies!” “It must’ve been rather a shock to Mrs Forbes, too.”

  “The poor little thing was so small and frail. Now I see, counting back, that she might’ve been Mr. Forbes’s daughter, just come early. He had been in Scotland on a buying spree the last winter, if you see what I mean.”

  “The plot thickens! There was talk of the baby not being John’s?”

  “If the baby was full-term, it couldn’t have been his. But it was so small, it might’ve been early.”

  “But the baby died,” said Rebecca. “Poor Elspeth. Mrs. Forbes. She must’ve been heartbroken.”

  Eric and Peter carried boxes into the kitchenette, their laughing and joking an odd counterpoint to Louise’s tragic story. “Mrs. Forbes was beside herself. Especially since the Gemmells’ baby was born just two days later, and she was fat and sassy.”

  “Ouch. I didn’t realize the babies were born close together. Rudolph must’ve been busy that winter.”

  Louise cackled delightedly. “Oh yes, I should think so!”

  “How cruel, though, to have a healthy baby just upstairs.” Rebecca visualized Elspeth languishing about the castle in pre-Raphaelite poses, like the Lady of Shalott.

  �
��And Mr. Forbes going on at her about Rudolph. I don’t think he knew for sure, but he certainly suspected. After the baby died Mrs. Forbes started railing at him that it was all his fault. She had a temper, that one. She’d scream at Mr. Forbes and the servants and throw dishes at them. Athena, the cook, Rudolph’s wife— she had to keep the Royal Doulton locked up.”

  Rebecca’s thoughts kaleidoscoped, settling in a new and different pattern. So much for her— and Eric’s— idealized picture of the tragic put-upon Mrs. Forbes. Who still liked to throw dishes.

  Louise bent forward. “Mr Forbes brought home some letter, and Mrs Forbes said it was because of the letter her baby died. Lost her mind, I’m afraid. Grief will do that.”

  “Letter?” Rebecca’s ears pricked.

  “Always kept it wrapped in an oilskin, he said.”

  Oilskin… . “The Erskine letter!” Rebecca cried, so loudly heads turned and one old lady reached for her hearing aid. Even Michael glanced up, brows at the alert. “Do you know where John— Mr. Forbes— kept it?”

  Louise shook her head. “That’s what he called it, all right. The Erskine letter. But I never saw it, dear. Sorry.”

  With a sigh and a pat on Louise’s hand Rebecca said, “That’s all right. Just daydreaming. So Elspeth jumped from the window. Not in despair, I guess, but in some kind of black anguish. You and she were alone in the house?”

  “Well, almost.” Louise looked down at her lap, her gnarled fingers twisting the necklace. “I was watching Katie, the Gemmell’s baby, in the kitchen. Mr. Forbes was in the study. Mrs. Forbes started screaming, ‘I want my baby back!’ Then I heard her fall.”

  “I’m sure it’s still a very painful memory,” said Rebecca. “I shouldn’t have asked about it.”

  “No, no, it was so long ago. All I really remember is grabbing up Katie when Mr. Forbes ran outside. He came back in white as a sheet. And the funeral. Poor little Jamie holding my hand, not understanding, and Athena glancing over at Rudolph.”

  “I can imagine. A stiff wifely ‘Are you satisfied now’ look. Athena knew about his relationship with Mrs. Forbes?”