“Yes?” Jan prodded.
“All right! Part of my job is to protect the house and the artifacts. This is the only lead I’ve got. I’ll see you tomorrow, with or without the shady customer upstairs.”
“Okay then.” Jan grinned encouragement. “See you tomorrow.”
Rebecca saw Jan to the door and then went through the boxes one more time. The letter and the photograph hadn’t magically reappeared. Hell, she said to herself. This is ridiculous. I’m just an innocent little drudge of an academic, all I wanted out of this was some self-respect.
She started piling the diaries back into the boxes. In the silence the taped melody playing on the fifth floor was faint but clear, coiling down the staircases like translucent smoke. She recognized this one, too—”Fhear a Bhata”, “The Boatman.” Michael’s voice, singing along with the tape, lifted and then died away, leaving one phrase hanging in the air: “You call me faker, you call me false one.”
He’s doing that on purpose, Rebecca thought with an aggravated snort. She, too, began to sing, first under her breath and then more loudly, almost defiantly, blanking out his voice.
Which, she realized suddenly, had stopped. She spun around and saw Michael standing in the doorway, a taut smile about to break his face. He held one of two inventories toward her. “You worked on this one, did you?”
From her crouch halfway across the expanse of the floor Rebecca squinted at the label. “Dressing room, fifth floor. Yes, I did.”
“Were all the little jeweled things there?”
“No. There’re some missing. Eric said some things were sold that James refused to mark off.” She put the last book in its box, closed the lid, and stood up.
Michael’s jaw jutted belligerently. “He’s been sayin’ that all along. Wi’ no receipts, no notes about where things were sold, naething at all. Can’t you own that’s a bit dicey?”
Rebecca set her hands on her hips and raised her own chin. “Sure it’s questionable. I never said I liked it.”
“And this one.” He held out the other book, the thick inventory of the main bedroom. “Elspeth’s necklace, the one in the portrait, is listed as present and accounted for. But it’s no there.”
“Eric told me ages ago that was long gone.” One corner of Rebecca’s mouth twitched and tensed. Go ahead, she ordered herself. Say it. “Besides, if anyone knows about that you do. The letter John wrote to the museum, about making a reliquary out of his wife’s jewels for the treasure. Remember that?”
“Half a minute.” Michael’s expression, already crisp, petrified. “John said it’d been used to make a reliquary, but Eric said it’d been sold?”
Darn, Michael slipped aside from that jab as adroitly as Eric himself. “The choker wasn’t here when Eric came on the scene,” Rebecca rationalized. “And John never said those were the jewels he was talking about.”
“Aye, he was a canny one, old Johnnie was.” They looked at each other, frustrated glare glancing off frustrated glare. “James must’ve known there was a treasure,” Michael said at last. “Do yon diaries tell where it is?”
“I don’t have time to read all the diaries. Neither do you.”
“If it’s a Scottish treasure, then I’m entitled to it.”
“You’re entitled to it? Or Scotland is?”
“As far as you’re concerned,” he snapped, “we’re one and the same.”
Rebecca strode to within a foot of Michael, her head and shoulders tilted back to erase the six inches of difference in height. “The same? Not sodding likely.”
He smiled again, crescent lines cut in his cheeks as though the smile were in parenthesis. “Sorry tae have interrupted your work. If you happen tae step on a wee jeweled casket for rose petals, do tell me.”
“A jeweled casket for rose petals? That was there three weeks ago. I marked it off.”
“Aye. Sae I see. But it’s no there the noo.”
Sparks swirled across her vision. “You’re checking up on me!”
“It’s only fair.” The sparks were reflected in his eyes.
She doubled her fists. She and Michael were acting like bloody-minded fools. If they were anything, they weren’t fools. “It’s too late,” she hissed, “for you to be playing the offended innocent.”
“It is, rather. And it’s nae good your playin’ judge and jury.”
“True enough.” Rebecca released her fist and shook out her hand. The marks of her nails made a neat row of gouges across her palm. “But you lied to me. You’ve been lying all this time.”
“No a’ the time, lass.” His voice dropped abruptly into such a low register she hardly heard it.
She stared at him. His teeth were clenched so tightly his cheeks were corded. His brows crumpled over eyes glinting with pride, pain and resentment, more at himself, she thought, than at her. For once he wasn’t trying to hide.
Rebecca’s rage sizzled like a drop of water on a hot iron and evaporated into a thin, dry weariness. “Have you been trying to scare me away? Have you taken any artifacts, or a letter from those boxes of diaries?”
“No.”
“Are you some kind of terrorist?”
“No.”
“What’re you up to, then?”
“Naething that concerns you.” He didn’t flinch. His eyes didn’t leave hers. He didn’t insult her by saying winsomely, “Trust me.”
No quarter, she reminded herself. “Why won’t you come clean with me?”
“I already had a bath the day, thank you just the same.”
Laughter swelled in Rebecca’s chest and she couldn’t hold it in. “Damn you, Michael!” she exclaimed, and she punched halfheartedly at him. “This is ludicrous!”
Michael dodged the punch. His expression cracked and softened and he, too, started laughing. “It’s a proper cock-up, and nae mistake.”
“I want to believe you.”
“Then feel free tae have a go at it.”
His wry humor was infectious. “So don’t trust anyone,” she told him with an expansive gesture. “You’re safer that way. Come on. I’ll help you search for that box.” Michael rolled his eyes toward the ceiling in an unmistakable expression of relief.
A casket for rose petals, Rebecca thought as she led the way up the stairs. A showy little thing that would sell quickly. Anyone could have taken that. But not Michael. If he had, he wouldn’t have pointed out its disappearance. Maybe Dun Iain was generating multiple interlocking conspiracies, but she simply couldn’t see how Michael Campbell, the last suspect on the scene, was their prime mover.
She glanced back. He looked at his feet on the stone steps, his face hidden by the fringe of his hair, and his body language that could be so compelling was once again mute. He hadn’t asked her to trust him. But she did.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The sixth floor ballroom was so still the silence hummed in Rebecca’s ears, so chilly her flesh contracted, trying to snuggle closer to the bone. Last night’s dusting of snow reflected the watery sunshine. The pale, blurred light bleached the walls and floor not of color but of definition, so that the room was filled by a subtle mist.
Rebecca drained her coffee, opened an inventory and went to work. 19th century landscape prints, check. A tiny casein painting, check. An exquisite Clouet miniature of Mary, Queen of Scots, check. The book Michael had tried to show her the day Ray had come, an elegant mint copy of Johannis de Fordun’s Scotichronicon Genuinem, was listed on this floor even though it had turned up on the fourth. The claymore from the study had already been checked off.
Last night she and Michael had ransacked the house like eastern and western bloc armies on formal maneuvers. The little casket was gone. Even after Michael had given up and gone off muttering braid Scots curses, Rebecca had continued doggedly on. She’d come out of the lumber room, skin, clothing, and mood equally grimy, to hear Michael playing the pipes. Playing every difficult piece in his repertory, no doubt to prove that his manhood was no longer damaged, thank you. As
she’d stood on the staircase, listening, her puzzled itch seemed to emanate from a phantom limb, impossible even to reach, let alone scratch.
The steps coming up the stairs to the ballroom were those of Michael’s Reeboks. “What was the final song you played last night?” she asked.
He studied her for a moment as though wondering if she’d turn his answer against him. “No Nighean Donn, Gradh Mo Chridhe,” he answered.
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”
He nodded toward the storerooms in the back. “So they’re comin’ the day to collect the books for the library?”
“I took out the ones that were in really bad shape, as well as the ones that’re worth something. A first edition Hemingway, for example.”
Michael shrugged, unimpressed by Hemingway. Rebecca opened a cabinet. With a slide and a thud the top sash of Elspeth’s window flew open. As one they jumped, and then shared a shamefaced smile. Michael tiptoed across the room and shut the window. “Would you like me to work in here wi’ you?”
“I can make it until noon, thank you,” Rebecca replied stoutly.
“Noon? What happens then?”
Rebecca considered his face. His cannon had been rolled into the armory for maintenance and his porcupine prickles were reduced to the texture of a hedgehog’s. Smudges of fatigue under his eyes looked like bruises on his fair skin. The lines at the corners of his mouth and between his brows were more deeply defined than they had been two months ago. His face wasn’t that different from the one staring back from her mirror. Shaking her head at herself and him both, she told him about the letter, how it and Katie Gemmell’s photo were gone, how she suspected Dorothy. “Would you like to come?”
“Oh aye, I’d like to hear what Louise has to say.”
“Michael,” Rebecca began, and then heard a faint hammering from downstairs. All right— she hadn’t really had anything to say to him.
Taking four flights of spiral stairs without pausing left her dizzy. She threw open the front door and stood blinking at a dark figure in a pallid halo of daylight. “Miss Reid?” it said, solidifying into a uniformed workman. “We’ve come to pick up your shipment.”
“Certainly. Come in.”
The hood of a silver-gray car peeked from behind a truck whose panel read “Ace Moving and Storage— you tag it, we bag it”. Of the two men talking by the truck’s cab, Rebecca recognized one. “Eric! What’re you doing here?”
Eric followed the workmen into the building, greeting Rebecca with a peck on the cheek. “I was at Golden Age, so I’d thought I’d run by and supervise. Hard to believe the day has come to start clearing the place out.”
“Just some nondescript books,” she replied.
“And those boxes for the Historical Society.”
Rebecca stopped dead outside the Hall. “What? Already?”
“The donation has to be made this year,” Eric explained, “if the estate is going to get the tax deduction. I thought you’d said they could go.”
“I did, it’s just… . “She looked through the door. The men were stacking the cardboard boxes of diaries and scrapbooks and the sacks of old clothes. “We were hoping there might be something in James’s diaries about the gaps in the inventories.”
“But you told me you didn’t have time to read them all.”
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t.”
“They’ll be safe and sound at society headquarters anytime you want them.” Eric pulled her aside as the workmen struggled to get their loaded dolley down the stairs.
“Oh, all right,” said Rebecca, “take them away, get it over with.”
Eric gauged the crumples in her brow and mouth. “Tired? We’ll go to a movie this Friday. Get your mind onto something else.”
As if that were possible. She inspected Eric’s smooth, handsome face, his tailored clothes, his slightly quizzical, slightly amused look. What a frivolous relationship, she thought, discreet and superficial. Just what she’d been looking for. She offered him an anemic smile. “Thanks, I’d like that.”
The workmen came back up. Phil Pruitt was just behind them, his quilted vest scented with motor oil and fish. “How is Steve?” asked Eric.
“Doing just fine,” Phil replied. “Mr. Adler, I’m sorry to bother you, but what you said once about the hospital bills. Steve’s going to need some of that plastic surgery, they tell me.”
The workers manhandled the dolly down the stairs. “Of course,” said Eric. “I talked to Dun Iain’s insurance company, and since Steve was working here when the— ah— accident occurred, his medical bills should be covered.”
“I sure do appreciate it,” said Phil.
The workmen asked about the books. “I’ll show you,” said Rebecca.
Eric guided Phil to the study. Rebecca led the men upstairs. Michael looked curiously up from the cabinet she’d left, inventory open on his lap. Elspeth’s window had opened itself again, the usual three inches from the top.
The boxes holding the books were imprinted with the brand names of catsup and toilet paper. When the men hoisted the first two the flimsy cardboard gave way and books crashed to the floor. The men shot aggrieved glances at Rebecca. She decided her presence was inhibiting their commentary and headed back down, passing Phil, his mission accomplished, on the way.
On the stairs to the second floor Rebecca heard Eric’s voice. Now it was in velvet mode, soothing, almost caressing, too soft for her to make out the words. Dorothy’s barbed voice ripped his. “— deserve it!”
Rebecca stopped, her hand on the rope banister. Deserve what?
Eric’s voice rolled over Dorothy’s like a buffing wheel, polishing its sharp edges. Rebecca caught the words “job” and “pension”. Oh— if the estate could do for Phil, surely it could do for Dorothy. Apparently the woman was going to make darn sure it did, legally or otherwise.
Eric walked Dorothy out onto the landing, his dark styled cut bent over her steel perm, and held her arm as she worked her way painfully down the stairs. The woman seemed shriveled, her once bloated flesh a couple of sizes too big for her, as if someone really had stuck a pin into her and deflated her. Having the flu was a drastic way to diet.
Rebecca peeked around the corner after them, then dodged into the study door ahead of the workmen as they wrestled boxes around the bend in the staircase. There was Dorothy’s purse sitting on a corner of the secretary. She picked it up and went on downstairs.
The vinyl bag was heavy, clinking as she walked. Unzipped, it gaped open to reveal several pill bottles sporting the labels of more than one pharmacy— and more than one doctor’s name. Valium, Rebecca read. Ativan. Elavil. Inderal. The last was for high blood pressure; her father took it. The others were tranquilizers; her mother had gone through several different kinds over the years. But all at once? No wonder Dorothy looked so ghastly. She needed detox more than Steve had.
Rebecca guiltily closed the purse and walked out the door holding it at arm’s length, like a vial of nitroglycerin.
Dorothy wasn’t there. Eric was leaning against her car talking to Heather. Rebecca squelched a grin. He was nondiscriminatory, he was going to vamp every female on the place. Heather was gazing at him through her lashes, slightly cross-eyed, as though she already had a bit of a crush on him. Girls that age don’t know superficial from bananas, Rebecca told herself. It’s girls my age who deliberately choose surface gloss over substance. She said, “Dorothy left her purse upstairs. Where is she?”
Heather jumped and blushed, making her heavily made-up face look like a jack-o-lantern. Eric’s polite smile broadened into an outright laugh. “In the kitchen. Here, I’ll take it to her.”
Rebecca handed over the purse. The workmen tramped by. And, just to complete the circus atmosphere, Warren Lansdale’s squad car came up the driveway. He had to stop by the mausoleum since the parking area was full. Rebecca, shivering, went to meet him.
The sheriff’s moustache was fluffy with glee. “Look what I found!”
“Not the mazer?” returned Rebecca.
His moustache wilted. “That was a low blow,” she apologized. “What do you have?”
He mimed a magician producing a rabbit out of a hat and held up a massive key. “The mausoleum key!” The metal was cold in her hand, sticking to her palm like a Popsicle to her tongue. “Where on earth did you find it?”
“I went out to the Pruitts’ house yesterday evening, after Steve got home. He looks terrible, but the accident did wonders for his disposition.”
“He handed over the key.”
“That’s right. He took it off your kitchen table three weeks ago with some idea of letting his friends into the mausoleum. Kids and their macabre ideas these days. It’s those horror movies, if you ask me.”
Rebecca nodded agreement. “But no one’s opened the lock. I go out and check it every few days. Yesterday, as a matter of fact.”
“He had second thoughts. He never really said why. Maybe he realized if those punk pals of his vandalized the place he’d not only do himself and his dad out of their jobs, this time he’d end up in jail.”
Rebecca thrust the key into her pocket. Its weight made her feel lopsided. “But how did he get it? I’d swear that the only times the front door was open, someone was in the kitchen… . “She frowned, unable to separate those particular details from the welter of details crusted on her mind.
Eric came toward them carrying Rebecca’s coat. A slender shape stood in the sixth floor window— Michael, Rebecca realized with a start, holding a bundle of butterscotch and white fur. Both man and cat were no doubt agog with curiosity over what Warren and Rebecca were talking about. Clutching her coat around her shoulders, Rebecca smiled a thank you to Eric and turned back to Warren. “And what’s Steve’s version of the fire?”
The sheriff tilted his hat back on his head. “Well, Phil says he told Steve to transfer the gasoline from the milk jugs to the can. Steve says he did it. Now I know you think, Miss Reid, you saw the jugs empty and the can full. But the shed is pretty dark… ”
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