by Joan Wolf
“Thank God.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, I know we have a reprehensible gun policy, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s time to get the police involved. Your life is at risk.”
“I don’t think it is anymore.”
“You can’t be sure of that.” She gave him a severe look. “What is your problem, anyway? Why are you so reluctant to call in the police?”
“I don’t need any more newspaper headlines, Tracy. Once the scandal sheets get hold of the news that I have been targeted for murder, they’ll have a field day. I’m just not ready to face all that again.”
Tracy understood him perfectly. “Ask the police to keep it quiet.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “It’s impossible to muzzle everyone who knows about something like this.”
Tracy turned around in her chair to regard the portrait of Charles that hung on the wall directly behind her. “Charles is trying to tell us something, Harry. If only I could decipher what it was!”
“Perhaps you will,” he said. “Perhaps you will.”
* * *
Later that afternoon, a car arrived from London with Ned’s rifle. The driver had instructions to deliver it to Harry personally, and he tracked him down at the stables. Unfortunately, Ned had just finished riding one of Harry’s younger horses and was standing next to Harry holding the horse’s reins when the driver presented him with the rifle.
Ned looked at the gun in his employer’s hand, and said in a puzzled voice, “That looks like my gun.”
The two of them were standing on the path between the paddock and the stable, and Harry replied soberly, “It is.”
There was a pause as Ned’s eyes moved from the rifle to Harry’s face. “May I ask what you were doing with my gun, Harry?”
“I was having it tested,” Harry replied in the same sober voice as before. “I wanted to see if the bullets that were shot at me the other day came from your gun.”
Ned’s eyes widened. “You were shot at?” River God butted his head against Ned’s shoulder.
Harry replied, “Someone fired a gun at me twice, down by the lake. I have also been the victim of an attempted hit-and-run, and the brake lines on my car were slashed, which caused me to have the car accident that sent me to hospital.”
“Oh my God,” Ned said in a horrified voice. “I didn’t know anything about those things.”
“Apparently you did not.” Harry reached out to lay a hand on Ned’s sleeve. “I never really suspected you, Ned. We just thought we should exclude as many guns as we could, so we wouldn’t waste time suspecting innocent people.”
River God began to dance on the gravel path to demonstrate his impatience at being kept standing. Ned called loudly toward the makeshift stable in the mange, “Someone come and take this horse from me.”
A young girl came running toward them and took River God’s reins, murmuring to him soothingly. When she was out of earshot, Ned turned back to Harry and said hoarsely, “I think I know who is behind these attacks.”
Harry’s eyes narrowed. “You do?”
“Yes, I think it’s Robin Mauley.”
There was a pause, then Harry said, “What makes you think that?”
Ned’s eyes held a look of desperate courage. “Because he bribed me to burn down your stable.”
Harry’s jaw dropped. “What?”
Ned ran his fingers through his curly hair, and said wretchedly, “God, Harry, what can I say to you? He told me that it would be just a temporary inconvenience for you, that you would have the insurance money to rebuild. I had no idea you were going to run into a problem with the E.H. I never would have done it if I had known such a thing.”
There was a shocked look on Harry’s face. “But why the hell did you do it, Ned?”
“He gave me twenty thousand pounds. It was enough for me to start my own stable. You know that’s been my long-term dream, Harry. And here if was, being handed to me on a silver platter.”
Harry said bitterly, “It never occurred to you that you were getting your stable at the cost of mine?”
“I told you, I thought the insurance money would cover the rebuilding. I knew you were insured, because you were always bitching about the price. It just never occurred to me that the insurance wouldn’t be adequate. You’re always so careful about things like that.”
“It should have been adequate,” Harry said in the same bitter voice as before. “I think Mauley bribed the E.H. officer to require that I rebuild with the original materials.”
“He probably did,” Ned said somberly. “And I’m sure he’s behind these attempts on your life. He wouldn’t tell me why he wanted me to burn the stable, but it was pretty obvious, I thought. He wanted to force you to sell him the land for the golf course. And when that didn’t work, he moved on to other methods.” He took a step closer. “Think, Harry. If something should happen to you, Silverbridge would go to Tony. And Tony is thick as thieves with Mauley over this golf course venture.”
“I have thought about it, and I agree that Mauley is the obvious suspect. But it’s also obvious that he had an accomplice. I can’t see Mauley himself disabling the brakes on my car, or running me down, or shooting at me in the woods.” He blew out a long breath. “Now it appears that there were two accomplices—you to burn the stable and someone else to try to kill me.”
Ned rubbed his hand across his eyes. “God, Harry, I don’t know what to say to you. I’m so ashamed of myself. I was sorry I had done it the minute the fire caught. I actually tried to put it out, but I couldn’t waste much time because I knew I had to get the horses to safety. I don’t know what got into me to do such a thing to you, who have always been kindness itself to me. I am terribly terribly sorry, and you can have the twenty thousand pounds Mauley paid me to put toward the rebuilding of the stable.”
“I think I will take you up on that offer,” Harry said grimly.
“Please do. And if you want me to leave your employ, I shall perfectly understand.”
“We’ll talk about that another time, Ned. Right now I’m late for a meeting with Tom Neeley.”
Ned nodded sadly. “I’ll make sure that the horses in the paddocks get their evening hay.”
Harry nodded and, without saying anything else, went back toward the house, where he had an appointment to meet with his farm manager.
28
Tracy finished shooting at three-thirty that afternoon, removed her makeup and costume in her dressing room, and returned to the house, where they were still shooting in the downstairs drawing room. She went to the upstairs drawing room, hoping against hope that she would see Charles.
He wasn’t there, but Caroline and her brother were. Caroline, wearing a blue silk afternoon dress and matching slippers, was seated on one of the sofas, and her brother was standing against the wall next to the fireplace, one hand grasping the end of the mantelpiece, the other hand holding a glass of wine. Caroline was crying into a lace-edged handkerchief.
“Try to get hold of yourself, Caro,” her brother said impatiently. “I can’t help you unless you can tell me what’s wrong.”
“It’s Charles,” she wept. She looked up from the handkerchief with watery blue eyes. “He’s leaving me.”
The man looked thunderstruck. “Leaving you? What the devil do you mean, leaving you?”
Caroline blew her nose and struggled for composure. “He’s going to follow Isabel to Boston. He’s going to s-stay there, Jeremy! He’s going to leave me and the boys and go to live with her in America. I shall be humiliated in front of the whole world.” Her blue eyes flashed with sudden anger. “And what am I to tell my sons? That their father has deserted their mother for their governess?”
This last word was followed by an audible sob, and tears started to fall again.
Jeremy came over to the sofa and sat down next to her, placing his wineglass on the table in front of them. “Explain this to me from the beginning,” he demanded. “Has Charles been having an affai
r with Isabel?”
Caroline reached for the glass and took a swallow. “Yes. I first suspected it a few months ago, and the more I watched them, the more certain I became.”
“Did you ever catch them in a compromising position?”
“No, it was nothing like that.” She frowned, trying to find the correct words. “It was… it was something in the air between them, Jeremy.”
He lifted a derisive eyebrow. “Something in the air?”
“If you had seen it, you would have recognized it, too,” she retorted.
“But you had no proof? You never found them in a compromising position?”
“No.”
“Damn it, Caroline. Then why didn’t you just hold your tongue and wait for Charles to grow out of this infatuation? They were being discreet. All you needed was patience.”
She clenched her hand tightly around her soggy handkerchief and stuck her chin defiantly in the air. “I am not one to stand by and watch my husband make a fool of himself over another woman.”
“Hundreds of other wives have done so, with the consequence that their husbands did not leave them.”
“You’re making this sound as if it’s my fault,” she said indignantly. “Charles is the one who is cheating, not me.”
He let out his breath with an impatient sound. “So you faced him with it?”
She sniffed and nodded.
“And did he deny it?”
Her eyes were downcast, focusing on her hands in her lap. “At first he did. Then, when I told him that Isabel had to leave, he got very cold.” Her eyes lifted to her brother’s face. “You know how he can be, Jeremy.” Angry color stained her cheeks. “And then he just walked away and left me standing there!”
He reached for his glass and finished his wine. After he had returned the glass to the table, he turned to her, and said judiciously, “You didn’t handle this well, Caro. You should have held your tongue and the affair would have fizzled. You pushed him into doing something he probably never intended to do.”
She started to cry again. “When he told me that he was sending Isabel to his cousin in Boston, I was so happy. I thought that things would go back to being what they had been before she came. But then… yesterday morning… he told me that he was leaving me and going to live with her in America. I couldn’t believe it, Jeremy! A man like Charles does not leave his position and his responsibilities to run away with a little nonentity of a governess. I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t. He was serious.”
He looked a little dubious. “Are you sure he was serious? That he wasn’t just trying to punish you for making him send her away?”
She sat up straight and replied indignantly, “He said that she was his ‘other self.’ He apologized to me, Jeremy. He said he was sorry that I was going to be hurt, but that this was something he had to do.”
“He must have lost his mind,” Jeremy said grimly. “He could easily have set her up in a house of her own and visited her whenever he wanted. There was no necessity to go to these lengths.”
Caroline’s blond curls trembled with her emotion. “Well he has, and he’s serious. He’s talked to a solicitor and made legal arrangements to hold the estate in trust for William. And he told me he had provided amply for my own needs.” With an anguished movement of her hands, she twisted her handkerchief back and forth. “Can you even begin to imagine the gossip this is going to cause? The Earl of Silverbridge, the great war hero, running off with his mistress like a lovesick boy. I shall be humiliated in front of the entire world. I think I’d rather die.”
“The war must have done something to his reason,” Jeremy said. His thick, dark eyebrows almost formed a bridge across his nose. “I can’t believe that the Silverbridge I knew before the war would be capable of doing such a harebrained thing.”
“It will be the scandal of the decade.” Caroline began to weep again. “It will be even worse than the Duke of Devonshire making his wife live in the same household as his mistress. Everyone will look at me and think, Poor Caroline. Such a pity she could not hold on to her husband.”
Jeremy got to his feet and paced back to the fireplace, where he turned and faced his sister. “It is an insult not only to you, but to me and to our entire family. It is also a deep injustice to his sons. He must not be permitted to carry out this fantastic scheme.”
“I don’t think I can bear it if he does, Jeremy. Everyone will talk about me, and pretend to be sorry for me, and… and… I just can’t bear it.” She tried to dry her eyes with her handkerchief, but it was too soaked to be of much use. “Do you have a handkerchief I can borrow?” she asked.
He came back to the sofa and handed her a clean white cotton square. “Don’t worry about this anymore. I’ll take care of Silverbridge for you, Caroline. He won’t find it so easy to escape his responsibilities as he thinks.”
She blew her nose into his handkerchief. “W… what will you do?”
His jawline looked very hard. “I’ll stop him.”
“He won’t listen to you. He is so cold about this, Jeremy.” Her voice rose slightly. “I have been a faithful wife to him. I took care of his house and children the whole time he was away at war. I was happy to have him home. I don’t deserve this!”
“No, you don’t.” He looked down at her from his position on the other side of the coffee table. “You were right to send for me,” he repeated. “If your husband doesn’t know how to protect his wife and children, you can rest assured that your brother does.”
He walked steadily out of the room, passing quite close to where Tracy stood. She watched him go by, registering the ruthless expression in his eyes, and when she returned her eyes to the sofa, Caroline was gone.
Tracy stood for a long time in the empty room, going over in her mind the scene she had just witnessed. Then she walked to the door that connected the drawing room to the bedroom passage, went through and into her own room.
The late-day sun was slanting in through the windows making all of the tabletops shine. The cleaning girl who comes in from the village once a week must have come this morning, she thought, as her eyes rested on the fresh flowers and polished wood of a Regency table. Slowly she walked to the sunlit window and looked out upon the front lawn.
A flow of costumed men and women was spilling out of the house and onto the front drive. Tracy watched them absently as they made their way toward the campers, her mind still caught up with the encounter she had witnessed between Caroline and her brother.
It had to be Jeremy who shot Charles, she thought. He did it to save his sister from a terrible scandal.
But how did that situation apply to Harry? Harry didn’t have a wife, let alone a brother-in-law.
I have to think about this logically, she told herself, trying to ignore the panicky feeling that was growing in her chest and stomach. I can figure this out. I have to figure this out.
She went over to the small French writing desk that was in the corner of her room and opened the single drawer, looking for paper. Inside were a white pad and a pen, neatly lined up next to each other. Tracy took out both and sat down at the desk, the writing materials in front of her.
I’ll match the people from Charles’s time to the corresponding people from today, she thought. Perhaps then I’ll figure this out.
The first two lines were easy. Charles = Harry, she wrote. Then, Isabel = Tracy.
Could Tony still be involved? But Tony was Harry’s brother, not his brother-in-law, and it seemed as if Tony had cleared himself of suspicion.
Caroline and her brother must equate with Robin Mauley and his golf course, she thought. Mauley wasn’t going to get what he wanted and so he contracted someone to do away with Harry. She picked up the pen again and wrote: Caroline = Mauley; Jeremy = ?
It was the question mark that was the problem. Who was the assassin hired by Mauley? And what did he have to do with Jeremy?
She sat for perhaps ten minutes, staring at the paper, and trying different names in plac
e of the question mark. It has to be there, she thought desperately. I am seeing these ghosts for a reason, I know I am. There has to be a connection somewhere…
Jeremy = Gwen, she wrote. As she looked at this equation, a thought popped into her mind. What if we've been on the wrong track this whole time? What if this isn’t connected to the golf course at all? What if it’s something entirely else?
After five more minutes of intensive thinking, Tracy got to her feet and went in search of her cell phone so she could get in touch with Mark Sanderson.
It was half an hour before Mark Sanderson called Tracy back. He agreed to do the research she requested and promised to call her as soon as he had anything.
After she had hung up, Tracy glanced at her watch. It was five-thirty. Perhaps Harry’s in the morning room, she thought, and went to look. But the morning room was deserted, and Harry had not yet taken the newspaper from its usual spot on the sofa table.
Tracy thought briefly about reading the paper herself, but there was a sense of urgency inside her that made the idea of sitting quietly impossible. She wanted to do something.
She went down to the kitchen to see if Mrs. Wilson might know where Harry was.
“He’s in his office, Miss Collins,” the woman said as she dropped peeled potatoes into the large pot that was cooking on the stove. “He’s with Mr. Neeley, his farm manager.”
“Then I won’t bother him,” Tracy said with a smile. She retraced her steps upstairs, but instead of continuing up to the second floor, she opened the door and went outside.
The afternoon light was a mellow gold, and there were only a few fleecy clouds floating in the sky. Tracy felt warm in her sweater and pulled it off over her head and tied it around her waist. Without making a conscious decision, she began to walk toward the back garden and the path that led both to the stables and the woods. It wasn’t until she took the cutoff to the woods that she recognized where she was going: to the lake.