Ashes to Ashes

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “I can bath mysel’, thank you,” he said, fending her off with a forearm and a grin. “You’re none too clean either.”

  “A flannel gown isn’t the most efficient of fire-fighting garments.”

  “Nor the most attractive.”

  “I wasn’t dressing for an audience.” She stooped to wipe the mud from the floor.

  “Dinna do that! We’ll have tae have Lansdale oot the morn!”

  “Oh, of course. Sorry.” She folded the towels and laid them on the counter. The breeze nibbled at her with tiny cold teeth. She shivered, her own teeth starting to chatter. Shock, she told herself dispassionately.

  “Cold?” This time when Michael raised his hand he locked his arm around her shoulders. “Or scared?”

  The stubble on his jaw was at the moment his only concession to prickliness; she ran her arm gratefully around his waist. His skin was cool beneath her hand. “Both,” she replied. “You would be too if your skin wasn’t so thick.”

  “It’s no sae thick as a’ that,” he told her.

  No, it wasn’t, she thought, but she wasn’t particularly surprised.

  They turned off the lights, left two windows slitted open, went back upstairs. With bemused smiles they parted in Rebecca’s doorway just as Darnley crept out from beneath the bed. His baleful look seemed to say, life was much simpler before you got here.

  Rebecca’s thoughts hung suspended in the hollowness inside her, as if they were displays tucked away behind safety glass. A clean nightgown. A bath. Hot water to wash away soot and sweat both… . Michael still stood in the door. She said, “It’s been a long time since you’ve asked me if I’m going to turn tail and run. Now’s your chance.”

  “A fine thrawn lass like yoursel’, runnin’ away? If the bogles canna get rid o’ you I widna expect a human bein’ tae do it.”

  “Stubborn, moi?” She laughed. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “It was meant as one. Good night, lass.”

  “Good night, lad. Thank you. And, oh, be sure to wash that scratch!”

  “I will, I will.” His bare feet padded up the staircase.

  Half an hour later, when Rebecca was curled drowsily in her nest of blankets, it occurred to her Michael might have hesitated in the door because his not so thick skin had wanted to sleep next to hers. Platonically, of course. In the spirit of comradeship.

  But you never could tell with men. Even the comradely ones were likely to have sex-saturated brains. Must be difficult for them, dealing with a handicap like that.

  Dealing with dreams like the one that had wakened her to the fire. Rebecca looked at the shadowed canopy as though her look could penetrate it and ceiling both and see Michael alone in his bed. Dr. Campbell had no business turning attractive on her. None at all.

  She drifted at last into a light but dreamless sleep. Monday morning dawned, as most Mondays seemed to do, cold, damp, and dismal.

  Warren Lansdale and a forensics team from Putnam arrived within an hour of Rebecca’s call, while she and Michael were still exchanging wry and wary glances over their breakfasts. The men crashed like a tidal wave over the house, collected various lumps and scrapings of mud and charcoal, boxed up the trash can, and with noncommittal shrugs ebbed away.

  Michael leaned against Mary’s marble effigy, his hands in his pockets. He was wearing his blue sweatshirt with the white Saint Andrew’s cross, the emblem on the flag of Scotland, as though he had nailed his colors to the mast. Warren stood in the door with his hat in his hands. Behind him the rain drifted down onto lawn, dovecote, and the assorted cars in the parking area. Rebecca inspected the sheriff’s face, trying to penetrate the shrubbery.

  His concern seemed perfectly genuine. “I was sure you’d seen the last of the vandalism. But a fire— that’s ugly. Would you consider leaving?”

  “No way,” stated Rebecca, despite the slightly sick feeling still lurking in the pit of her stomach. “I’m not letting some nut push me around.”

  “Mr Adler is out of town?” the sheriff went on.

  “I left a message with his secretary, and she said she’d pass it on to him if he calls in. He couldn’t do anything if he were here.”

  Warren shook his head. “Just the vandalism. Nothing else has been stolen. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense to whoever’s doin’ it,” Michael said.

  Rebecca crossed her arms. “Warren, do you have the mausoleum key?”

  “No ma’am, I sure don’t.” His moustache wilted, hurt.

  But Michael’s jaundiced gaze sustained her into another question. “Did you know we found the will you signed for James on August 24?”

  “Yes, Mr Adler said it’d turned up.”

  “Do you know why James never got anyone else to sign it?”

  “No. When I left him that afternoon he was putting away the chess pieces, chuckling over how he was going to surprise Mr. Adler… ”

  “What?” interrupted Michael, standing up straight. “James didn’t want Adler to know about that will?” Rebecca shot a keen glance at him. Interesting point, but do you have to raise it with such relish?

  “James hadn’t told him about it when I left,” Warren repied. “But he knows about it now, so James must’ve told him later.”

  “Weren’t you curious,” Michael persisted, “why the will you signed, the one that didn’t provide for relatives, wasn’t the one in effect?”

  Warren glanced from Michael to Rebecca and back, obviously wondering why a higher education had left them so obtuse. “James’s wills were his business. I signed where he asked me to sign. If he changed his mind again that was no concern of mine.”

  Michael caught Rebecca’s warning eye and subsided against the sarcophagus. “Thank you. Much obliged for your help.”

  Mollified, Warren glanced at his watch. “If you want that lock changed again, just say so. Someone must’ve copied one of the keys to the other one.”

  “The dead bolt you brought ought to do it,” replied Rebecca. “And thank you for the smoke detectors. I’ll make sure Eric reimburses you.”

  Lansdale settled his hat firmly on his head. “No rush. I feel bad enough about this— you come to do your jobs and all this happens to you.” He backed into the rain. “I’ll let you know if the lab finds anything.”

  The squad car swished down the driveway. Michael exchanged a careful glance with Rebecca. “Is he hidin’ something, or is he just unimaginative?”

  “I wish I knew.” She dived out the door and padded across the wet lawn to the toolshed.

  The small clapboard building smelled of soured grass clippings, fertilizer, and gasoline. In the light of a single bare bulb Phil and Steve crouched amid rakes, flowerpots, boards, and cobwebs, absorbed like Roman soothsayers in the entrails of a lawn mower. “Excuse me,” Rebecca began. “Would you mind putting up some smoke alarms and installing a dead bolt on the door before you quit today? They’re on the kitchen table.”

  “I’ll do it right now,” Phil said, unfolding himself from his crouch. To Steve he said, “Make sure you get those bolts on tight.”

  Just inside the door two milk jugs encrusted with brown goo stood next to a fresh red gas can. No wonder the place stank of gasoline, Rebecca thought. Surely Eric didn’t know they’d been keeping it in plastic jugs.

  Maybe the lab would find traces of gasoline in the trash can. She looked narrowly at Steve, but his lock of hair was as effective as a highwayman’s mask in concealing his expression. Innocent until proven guilty, she reminded herself, and started back for the house.

  The clouds were so low they touched the top of the castle, the weather vane looking like it was packed in cotton batting. It wasn’t much warmer in the entry, and the breath of the house was damp and musty in Rebecca’s nostrils, but the lights shone with comforting halos. She was telling Phil where the smoke alarms needed to go, on second-, fourth-, and sixth-floor landings, when she heard Dorothy’s indignant voice.

  The housek
eeper had already given them chapter and verse for calling her on her day off. Rebecca had had to invoke Eric’s name, coupled with the words “overtime pay”, to do the trick. “You told me to clean it and I’m cleaning it!” Dorothy was saying.

  “But you’re muckin’ it aboot!” protested Michael.

  Rebecca found Dorothy and Michael confronting each other just inside the Hall. Oh my God— the woman had taken a scrub brush to the original gilt frame of a 200 year old Romney portrait.

  Rebecca intervened, muttering whatever soothing phrases came to her mind— lack of communication, no harm done. Michael carried the painting away like a fireman rescuing a child from a burning building. Dorothy, frowning ferociously and muttering about people who couldn’t speak English right, turned to the soot scum on the window. Rebecca fled.

  Michael was in the kitchen, tenderly wiping the frame and murmuring assurances to the portrait. He was oblivious to Rebecca standing in the doorway. They must’ve been suffering from smoke inhalation last night, she thought with an affectionately exasperated smile, falling on each other like that. Nice hug, though. Absolutely first rate.

  She headed upstairs, replaced the glass bottles left in the fourth floor hall, and went into James’s bedroom.

  She sealed the boxes of baby clothes. The poor little girl hadn’t even lived long enough to have a name. If James haunted the house because of unfinished business, then, perhaps, so did Elspeth, looking for the baby she’d never accepted was gone.

  Elspeth’s clothes were fusty and limp, rather nasty, like plants growing in a stagnant pond. Cautiously Rebecca bundled them into black trash bags for the Historical Society, waiting to be gripped by some paroxysm of anger or grief. But whatever spirit of Elspeth lingered in the house had long since deserted its mortal clothing. Not the briefest whiff of lavender stirred the close, still air in the room. At last Rebecca got up, brushed off her sweater and jeans, and opened the window.

  A shrill angry voice smacked her like Michael’s wet towel. There, on the drab winter-brown lawn behind the castle, Steve stood hunched truculently while Heather’s entire body gesticulated rage at him. Her words were lost in the rush and rustle of the rain.

  Steve shrugged and turned away. Typical male. Heather stood there with her guts strung out beside her and he decided to sweep the shed or something. Heather grasped his arm and turned him back. He threw her away from him so forcefully she went sprawling. Rebecca gasped, clenching her fists on the windowsill. But Steve was already helping Heather up with every appearance of remorse.

  Arm in arm, Heather sulking, Steve cajoling, they walked around the corner of the building. A few minutes later a car revved, loudly and unnecessarily, in the parking area. Heather’s stepmother’s Datsun, no doubt; the girl drove it with the heedless swoop of the newly licensed.

  Well! Rebecca thought. Heather was turning out as surprisingly as Elspeth had. There must be something in the atmosphere at Dun Iain that made mice into lions. And what had that argument been about, anyway?

  Phil appeared in the door. “Alarms are up. Dead bolt’s fixed.”

  “Thank you,” she replied. His steps disappeared downstairs. Dorothy’s voice echoed upstairs. The front door slammed twice.

  A preternatural silence fell over the castle, the usual creaks and pops of the house swallowed in the white noise of the rain. Rebecca started down the stairs and walked right into Darnley’s steady gaze as he crouched in the corridor, playing Greyfriars Bobby yet again. She stopped, a chill running its cold fingers down her spine.

  He’d seen James lying there dead. Had he seen him fall? Or had he seen the old man pushed? The cat roused itself, looked up, meowed. Rebecca picked him up and laid her cheek against his soft fur, his little body thrumming comfortingly against her face.

  Maybe some food would soothe the vague unease like a poison ivy rash in her stomach. She found Michael in the kitchen heating up the leftover soup. “Great minds think alike,” she said. “I’ll make some bran muffins.” They cooked and ate, jostling for the last crumbs, and when at last the food was gone Rebecca said, “You go on, I’ll clear up.”

  Michael departed waving the bottle of Laphroaig and two glasses. “Usquebaugh was invented for a dreich night like this one. The museum, at least, expect their scholars tae be drinkers.”

  “I won’t tell the state if you won’t,” Rebecca replied.

  That was what she needed, she thought as she finished the dishes, threw the dead bolt, and started upstairs. A good hot meal to dull the nerves. As dismal day clotted into dark night outside, the inside of the castle became cozy, even the ghosts dozing in the gentle swish of the rain. The stone shed its gray chill, the dark paneling glowed warmly in the lamplight, and the steps spiraled like the petals of a sunflower. Like Michael, the house was very appealing when well behaved.

  His voice wafted down the stairs. As Rebecca took down and brushed out her hair she listened to the song, then laughed. No wonder she couldn’t understand the words; he was singing Runrig’s “Chi Min Geamhradh”. She went on to the fourth floor and stepped into the bedroom as his voice leaped upward with emotion. He saw her and stopped. The next phrase fell silently, like a silk scarf, through her mind. “What do the words mean?”

  “I dinna ken. I dinna have the Gaelic; I learned the song by rote.” He smiled reminiscently. “I knew a lass from Skye when I was at university. In moments o’ emotion she’d start talkin’ Gaelic. A’ those soft gutturals like puffs o’ thistledoon in my ear.” He reached for the bottle perched atop the bureau and poured a generous dollop into the empty glass. “Here you go.”

  “Thank you.” What dynamic of rain and Scotch had brought forth that confidence? Rebecca smiled, admiring the sinuous dance of the light in the amber liquid in her glass. “Here’s to the little man in the velvet weskit.”

  “Which means?” asked Michael teasingly, raising his own glass.

  “The mole who dug the hole into which King William III’s horse stumbled, killing him. William, not the horse. I assume the mole was sitting there smoothing its little plaid and snickering.”

  “Very good.” Michael bowed graciously and sipped, swished the whiskey around his mouth and with a blissful smile swallowed.

  The whiskey detonated inside Rebecca’s mouth and nose, filling her head with peat smoke and heather. She settled down on the floor next to the apothecary’s chest. The space heater sighed. The rain, muted by the stone walls, crooned a siren song about burns and braes. The smell of leather books and furniture polish mingled with the tang of whiskey inside her sinuses.

  More old maps were in the first drawer. The next one held postcards and candy wrappers. The third… . “Uh-oh,” Rebecca said, “a contraband copy of Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth. The title’s been scratched off the spine. James, hiding it from his father? Or John, checking up on the competition?”

  “Look at these novels,” said Michael. “All wi’ Elspeth’s name written on the flyleaf. Mrs. Holmes, Mrs. Southworth— sentimental moralists I’d expect. But Ouida, and Lady Audley’s Secret. Racy stuff.”

  “I’m getting to like Elspeth,” admitted Rebecca. She opened another drawer and was rewarded by a mint copy of Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides.

  “How old are you?” Michael asked suddenly.

  “How old am I? Twenty-seven. Why?”

  He laughed. “You’re sae girlish at times. And yet you have such matronly gravitas. Gey contradictory.”

  She sat with the book in her lap and stared at him. He found her contradictory? She countered, “How old are you?”

  “Altogether too close to thirty, hen.”

  Again he’d called her a pet name. Her cheeks burned— from the whiskey, no doubt. Rebecca opened the next drawer. In it was a wool cloth, green Forbes tartan. She took it to the bed and spread it out. It had a distinct odor of mothballs, but only two tiny holes. “Are you going to want this?”

  Michael glanced around. “Bundle it up wi’ Elspeth’s clothes.” He turned back,
singing under his breath, “I’ll roll you in my green plaid while we lie upon the grass.”

  Rebecca quelled a giggle and reached for the far end of the cloth. “Did you ever want to play the pipes for one of the folk-rock groups? You’re as good as any I’ve heard.”

  “Why, thank you. You heard me playin’, then?”

  “The great Highland pipes are a little hard to miss.” She overbalanced and climbed onto the bed. “Although I almost wish I hadn’t; they made me hideously homesick for a place I’ve barely been.”

  He was looking at her again; she felt that exacting blue gaze on her back. “No sae surprisin’. You’ve been livin’ there in your mind for years.”

  “Oh. You’re right. Very perceptive.” She glanced around appreciatively. He shrugged, smiling back. She sat down and pulled the ends of the cloth toward her.

  “Mind you,” Michael said, “I would’ve liked to play wi’ a group. But I wisna keen on livin’ on the dole between engagements. So I contented mysel’ playin’ for the Glendhu band at the occasional festival.”

  “Have you ever tried Rizzio’s guitar?”

  “And Baron Ruthven wi’ his wee dirk comin’ after me like he did poor Davy Rizzio? I’m never touchin’ that again.”

  “Another booby-trapped artifact? In the ashes of time you do find the odd live ember.” Rebecca laid the cloth on the foot of the bed. Compared with some of the other rooms in the house this one was not at all haunted. Not one object they’d found here had that strange resonance, as compelling as music. “I played the accordion,” she said. “We couldn’t carry a piano around with us. But after endless repetitions of ‘Beer Barrel Polka’ and ‘Fascination’ I gave up. It was only later I realized I could’ve been playing the old Scottish and Irish songs, like the ones you grew up on.”

  “I grew up on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Willie Nelson.” Michael stood, rescued her glass of Scotch, and brought it to her.

  “Thanks.” Tilting her head to drink, she saw that the underside of the canopy was stitched with intricate floral figures. She set her glass on the bedside table, flipped off her shoes, and lay back. “Well, look at that!”