Ashes to Ashes

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Yeah.” Surrounded by the dark blue ski mask Steve’s pale eyes made his head look like a skull in negative image. Rebecca didn’t need to see his disfigured face to sense his fear. Having your employer try to burn you to death didn’t generate loyalty. He glanced over his shoulder more than once during their trip up the stairs, but no more often than Rebecca.

  The next half-hour was the most unpleasant Rebecca had ever spent. But by the time they walked Heather out of the bathroom and up and down the corridor her eyes had cleared and she was muttering curses at them. Steve, with surprising tenderness, tucked her back into bed. “I’ll bring help, I promise,” he said. His eyes glinted with terror, but his voice was firm.

  “Thank you,” Rebecca replied. “I couldn’t have taken care of her alone.” And she thought, Michael sure had found something interesting in one of the small storerooms. The turkey, they could’ve used his help.

  When Rebecca opened the front door a blast of wind buffeted her and she clung to the handle. “Bon voyage,” she said as Steve plunged past her. For a moment he was a silhouette amid swirling white confetti. Then he was gone.

  Rebecca stood squinting into the darkness. Steve’s steps were deep holes in the drifted snow, deeper than the set he’d made coming in. Heather’s steps were almost filled. Three sets of tracks. Rebecca’s teeth were chattering. She slammed the door, shot the bolt, trudged wearily into the kitchen and started clearing up the broken dishes.

  She stopped suddenly in mid stoop, dustpan dangling. When she’d opened the door for Steve to leave, the dead bolt had been open. But she’d shut it when she’d admitted Heather. If the dead bolt had been closed when Steve came no key could possibly have let him into the house.

  Rebecca dropped the broom and dustpan and raced upstairs, vaulting the barrier of crystal bottles. “Michael! Michael, where are you?” He wasn’t on the sixth floor. His coat and his wellies weren’t in his room. Neither was his flashlight. He was gone. Not in his car— it was still in the parking area under its shroud of snow.

  Rebecca’s knees dumped her onto a stone step. Her mind shattered like the dishes, shards of thought tumbled in indiscriminate piles like a thousand-piece puzzle. She scrabbled among them; some had to fit together.

  Three sets of footprints. Heather coming. Steve coming and going. Michael going… . That wasn’t right. Somebody had levitated.

  A movement. Rebecca spasmed to her feet. Darnley sat at the foot of the stairs, bristling, staring upward, not at her but through her. James’s steps plodded down the stairs behind her. She shrank against the wall. A shape brushed by her, too solid for air, too insubstantial for flesh. Her eyes burned, but she could see nothing.

  The steps stopped. Darnley looked up, meowed, and arched his back as if petted by an invisible hand. Then the cat glanced at Rebecca as if to say, yes, something wrong with you?

  Silence. Rebecca started to breathe again. With a tangible click her thoughts dropped into place. James had fallen down these stairs and been buried in the mausoleum. Steve had taken the mausoleum key without apparently coming in the house. Darnley went in and out of the dovecote. Michael had looked through her when he turned away from the window, lost in thought. Elspeth’s jewels made a reliquary.

  “Why that sneaky underhanded two-timing rat!” Rebecca exclaimed. “What a muckle great idiot I am, and with all the evidence he had!” Her voice echoed mockingly up the stairs. She left it behind as she galloped to the study. The mausoleum key was gone. Not one puzzle piece, then, but two, fitting back to back like the dovecote and the mausoleum.

  She grabbed her coat and hat, gloves and boots— not that she was cold, she was burning with rage. She ran to Michael’s bedroom, pulled two blankets from his bed and spread them over Heather. The girl’s forehead was cool, but not cold. Her breathing was nice and even.

  Rebecca finished sweeping up the dishes, the shards rattling into the trash pail. There— that was the shelf that had Darnley’s hole beneath it. No coincidence that the one next to it was the one the dishes had fallen from. Steve, a klutz at the best of times, probably couldn’t see much through that ski mask.

  She poked, prodded, and with a fierce oath kicked. The shelves moved. Subtlety, she told herself, not force. She pulled, and with the hiss of oiled hinges the entire section of shelves and the wall behind them swung open. Rebecca aimed her flashlight into darkness. John’s paranoia? An idle moment for the architects? A joke of James’s?

  It didn’t matter. A short muddy stairway led to a tunnel that was so low she had to stoop. Stone walls traced with root tendrils leaned toward her. She was beneath the huge, heavy walls of the castle. Contracting her body into as little space as possible she shone the light ahead. The path was perfectly clear, the stone flags of the floor marked with foot and pawprints. Grand Central Station.

  A small hole was Darnley’s detour to the moggie gate behind the rosebushes. The main track led on. The odor of mildew and dirt choked her. The skin between her shoulder blades prickled but she didn’t turn around. Ahead of her was a rounded three foot high opening like the door of a hobbit hole, outlined by the faint silvery glow of the night.

  She emerged inside the dovecote, the wind whining through the frost-rimed interstices in the stone. Hinges gleamed murkily on the inside of a stone that was, on close inspection, only plastered wood. A handy dandy little entrance indeed.

  Rebecca opened the door and stepped out. The snow around the side of the mausoleum and on the steps down to the entrance was pocked with footprints. The lock, glinting with bright bronze streaks, hung open. A dim yellow luminescence leaked between the door and its frame.

  Here in the lee of the structure the wind was stilled. The laden tree branches creaked sadly. If Rebecca turned around she might see spectral faces among them. If she went inside the tomb she might see worse. She stood palpitating, listening, sensing. Malice, yes. A sad tired malice, gnawed almost to nothingness. A terrible patience worn so thin and fine it had at last snapped. Perhaps as the things in the house were sorted through John lost his last hold on existence. He’d defined himself through his possessions.

  “Do you want it found, John?” Rebecca whispered. “Are you as tired as I am of this charade?”

  Fortunately there was no answer. Taking a deep breath of ice and mold Rebecca threw her shoulder against the massive door. It gave. Her momentum carried her inside, and her feet stumbled down a short flight of steps.

  She had a quick impression of shelves built into the stone walls, for the most part filled with nothing but dust, cobwebs, and darkness. A flat stone bench like a druid altar stood in the center of the building’s semi-circle. Michael sat there, his elbows resting on his knees, his head hanging, his flashlight lying beside him. He twitched but didn’t look up at Rebecca’s sudden entrance. His light seemed as bright as a strobe flash, illuminating one arc of the curving wall. Above it shadows clung like bats to the ceiling.

  Rebecca tightened her teeth, filtering a stench of mildew and decay so thick she expected it to deflect the beam of her own flashlight. She ignored the slow crawl of her skin and swept her light around the tomb. To her left was a shelf holding a dusty coffin, its brass nameplate tarnished. But she knew what it said: “John Forbes, 1847-1931”. Just below it was another coffin, its wood still bravely gleaming beneath a thin patina of dust. That nameplate was quite legible: “James Ramsay Forbes, 1892-1988”.

  Michael faced a third coffin, even grayer and more dismal than John’s. It had no nameplate, but Rebecca knew whose lovely mortal shell lay there broken but not quite abandoned. “Elspeth,” she whispered. Her breath was shockingly loud. Michael stirred but didn’t look up.

  Below that shelf was a miniature coffin as sad and derelict as Elspeth’s. The baby might not have been hers. It probably wasn’t even a Forbes. But whether mother and daughter or murderer and victim, the woman and child were spending eternity side by side.

  In the glare of light, trailing cobwebs back into the shelf beside the baby’s c
offin, was a box. Its tilted lid was smeared with handprints revealing the rich sheen of mahogany. A screwdriver lay on the floor beside it.

  Michael was sitting a good three feet away. As Rebecca stepped closer she saw tears like drops of ice glistening on his cheeks. Her rage died with the sudden flare of a magician’s flame paper. “The Forbes treasure? You’ve found it?”

  He wiped his face with a gloved hand. “Oh aye, I’ve found it.”

  Rebecca walked forward. The cold air seeping through the door made odd little whorls with the clammy air inside the tomb, stirring dead leaves across the stone floor and licking at her ankles. Malice, patience, pain… . She ignored the bulk of Elspeth’s coffin just above her and focussed her light into the shadow-filled box.

  A face looked up at her. Her breath escaped in a short cry. She jerked away and spun toward Michael aghast.

  “Got me too,” he said. “Payin’ me back for a’ those jokes aboot her. But it’s no her head. Look again.”

  With an audible swallow Rebecca looked again. The beam of her flashlight wobbled and steadied. The face was plaster; each eyelash of the closed eyes was defined, the cheeks were slightly sunken, the nose sharp. The mouth curved in a delicate, chillingly tranquil smile. It was the face of the effigy, of the Curle portrait— the face of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Rebecca went down on her knees in the dust and litter. “My God. It’s beautiful. It’s horrible.”

  “You said yoursel’,” replied Michael, “the face o’ her effigy was modeled on her death mask, but the mask at Lennoxlove’s no like it. And that one’s too small. This is the real one.”

  “Provenance?” Rebecca’s voice thinned to a wisp.

  Michael knelt beside her and opened a small drawer in the base of the box. It was filled with yellowed papers. “Provenance a’ the way back tae the great hall at Fotheringhay. Queen Elizabeth ordered the mask made. She’d never actually seen Mary, mind you, and this was her last chance. That face is hers. It’s really hers… . “He stopped to regain control of his voice. After a moment he said, “The Erskine Letter’s no here, either.”

  A draft snaked along the floor and beneath the hem of Rebecca’s coat. Stone grated on stone. She glanced up and swung her light around the tomb. Nothing was there, just shade and sorrow and stench.

  Michael indicated the cloth in which the mask was nestled. “John cut up an Aubusson tapestry for her. Cheap at the price. I dinna ken aboot this, though.” He flipped aside a fold of fabric next to the plaster chin.

  Cold flame danced around the face. Elspeth’s garnet, jet, and diamond choker wrapped the severed neck of the dead queen. “John loved Mary,” Rebecca said. “She’d never lied to him… ” She leaped to her feet, away from Elspeth’s coffin. But nothing happened. Elspeth’s spirit was in the house.

  Michael heaved himself up beside her. “James never kent where the necklace was. He lied, Adler lied, it’s a’ been lies, a’ but that face.”

  “Lies?” said Rebecca. The unwholesome air clogged her chest and made her slightly dizzy. “Lies?”

  Michael flinched.

  “Why did you come out here alone?” she went on, not in a shout but in a mild perplexed weariness. “Is that how you were able to look me in the eye and tell me you hadn’t stolen anything, because you hadn’t yet found what you were planning to steal?”

  “No!” he protested, and then, on a long agonized sigh, “I dinna ken what the hell I was plannin’.”

  “You might not be able to sell the mask,” said Rebecca remorselessly, sparing neither of them. “But the necklace would sure bring a tidy sum. No one need even know it was here.”

  “You would,” he said under his breath.

  “Don’t mind me. I’m the one who thought that line about ‘the greed of the Campbells’ was just propaganda. Well, you and Colin can get what you want now, guns or fancy cars or whatever you’ve been after all this time.”

  “No guns. We never wanted guns.”

  “No. I don’t think you did.” Her voice trembled but she was too tired to steady it. Maybe Michael’s shoulders were shaking. It was too dark to tell. Rebecca herself shook, the clamminess of the tomb permeating coat and sweater and oozing into her bones. The mask looked upward. She wasn’t so sure its lips weren’t moving in prayer.

  Quickly she covered the cold, pale, compelling face with a piece of tapestry, set the cover back on the box and replaced the screws. “We might as well leave it here. Cold and damp— a museum couldn’t preserve it any better.”

  With a heave and a startlingly loud scrape and crash Rebecca put the box back on the shelf. She stood, dusted herself off, and turned away from Elspeth and Mary and the link, a dead child, that bound them together throughout time. Holding the screwdriver toward Michael she said, “Here. If you decide you want the necklace you’ll need this.”

  He didn’t take it. She could hear his ragged breath in the silence, edged with the distant wail of the wind. With a snort of exasperation that was close to a sob she thrust the screwdriver into his pocket. “Here, damn it!”

  His flashlight rolled slightly on the bench and the shadows swirled and steadied. His ravaged face turned away from her toward the darkness.

  Rebecca spurted into the cold but fresh air. Around the corner of the tomb the gale-driven snow slapped her face and ran like tears down her cheeks. The lights of the castle hung in the seething darkness before her as if they were strung in mid-air. She stood, snow drifting over the tops of her boots, and looked at them. Dun Iain’s impassive face made no response.

  For once I had my priorities straight, she thought. Michael and I were friends before ever approaching love, physical or otherwise. For us there wouldn’t have been a boundary but a ford, a gate, a bridge. She spun and shouted toward the misshapen hump of the mausoleum, “But there’s no such thing as truth, is there?”

  Her words were shredded by a gust of wind so strong she staggered against the icy side of the dovecote. From the woods came a rumbling thud and a wet hiss. Every light in Dun Iain went out. Rebecca stood blinking. Another branch, this time breaking the power line. She wasn’t surprised.

  Beyond the snow-filled beam of her flashlight loomed the merest suggestion of blackness, of solidity in an insubstantial world. Rebecca opened the door in the doocot, trudged inside, and shut it behind her.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The kitchen was as dark as the tunnel. At least the walls and the ceiling didn’t seem like a throat threatening to swallow her. The clock gyrated in the beam of Rebecca’s flashlight as her hand shook to the pounding of her heart. It was seven-thirty. She could’ve sworn it was midnight.

  She shut the secret door and the door to the pantry itself. She stood breathing deeply and rhythmically of the still, warm air of the kitchen with its undercurrents of dust and toast, forcing her heart to steady.

  “Whatever happens,” Michael had said, “I want you to know… ” What? Had he still been planning to steal the treasure as late as yesterday?

  And yet, no matter what his intentions had been, she couldn’t believe he’d ever actually stolen so much as a paper clip. He’d lied, yes. But his expression in the mausoleum had been that of a man who’d struggled through the hell of his own worse nature and emerged bloodied but unbowed.

  Rebecca pulled her gloves off with her teeth and threw them in the direction of the counter. As if she didn’t have some rather more important things to worry about. Dorothy had intended for them to be deep in pharmaceutical dreamland when she and her minions came to take what they could and run. Circle the wagons, batten down the hatches, raise the drawbridge… . None of which would make any difference to people who no doubt had a key to the house and burglar’s tools to open the dead bolt.

  She’d done enough already, naively assuming they’d choose the honorable way out. With a snort of disgust Rebecca pushed the table against the pantry door, blocking it. She took another flashlight from the drawer, put it in the pocket of her jeans, and walked into the entry.


  Heather’s outer garments still lay across the sarcophagus. Rebecca scooped them up and focussed her light on the cold white face of the effigy. Yes, even in half-scale it was the same as the mask, the fullness of the face emphasized by middle age, the slightly aquiline nose emphasized by death. Rebecca shuddered in awe and horror mingled.

  Forcing herself away from that face, she opened the bolt on the door. In spite of everything Michael was still the only friend she had tonight.

  She plodded to her room. No electricity, no space heater. She couldn’t carry Heather upstairs to the fireplace. She pulled her hat onto the girl’s lolling head and arranged the collection of coats across her body. Running away was no option, especially when it would mean leaving Heather, a discarded pawn, behind.

  Rebecca turned off her flashlight and leaned against the window embrasure, arms crossed tightly. The wind sobbed, blowing the snow horizontally across the glass. Maybe she could play possum, pretending to be asleep while the predators helped themselves; she could always testify against them later. But if Steve had been sent to scout, not to get Heather, they’d know she hadn’t eaten the tainted food.

  Maybe they wouldn’t come tonight, discouraged by the weather… . Not bloody likely. Not after all the time and effort they’d already expended.

  Rebecca moaned between her teeth. She was hideously vulnerable in the dark, in the cold, in the labyrinth of the old house. So were the artifacts, their haunting memories destined to be sold like boxes of cornflakes. Her mind tested the razor’s edge of hysteria and recoiled. Stop it! She doubled over, grinding her fists into her ribs. How dare they scare me like this! How dare they make me feel so helpless!