by Joan Wolf
The scene between Caroline and Jeremy she had witnessed earlier had unnerved her. It seemed as if time was telescoping, and the fatal moment when Charles was shot was almost at hand.
I can’t prevent Charles from being shot, she thought, as she walked along the bridle path underneath the spring-green trees. It happened in the past. It’s done.
But something was drawing her toward the lake.
The lake was where it happened before, she thought.
She had a feeling that the lake was where it was going to happen again.
It was six o’clock when his farm manager finally left Harry’s office. He put away the account books they had been looking at, then ambled next door to the kitchen to see what Mrs. Wilson was making for dinner. He found her folding up her apron and preparing to leave for home.
“I’ve a pot roast on the stove for you, my lord,” she said briskly. “It’ll be ready whenever you want to eat.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Wilson,” he replied, as he appreciatively sniffed the aromas coming from the stove.
He left the kitchen before she did and went upstairs to the morning room, planning to read the evening paper. He had just fixed himself a whiskey and water and opened the paper when Jon came into the room.
“Silverbridge. I’m glad I found you.” His voice sounded slightly breathless.
Harry looked up in surprise. Jon was not in the habit of seeking out his company.
Jon went on, “I finished filming earlier and went for a walk in your woods to wind down. I came across an injured deer near the lake path—the poor thing has a broken leg and is suffering quite pitiably—and I was wondering if I could borrow a gun to put her out of her misery.” There was a sheen of sweat on Jon’s face that, along with the breathlessness, betrayed that he had been hurrying.
Harry folded his paper and stood up. “I’ll come along with you. We might have to look for her a bit. It’s amazing what animals can do even when they’re badly injured.”
“That’s good of you,” Jon replied. He added gruffly, as if embarrassed, “I can’t bear to think of an animal in pain.”
“Nor can I,” Harry said. “I’ll just get a gun from my office and meet you outside.”
He walked past Jon, who was still standing in the doorway, and went back downstairs to his office, where he unlocked the gun cabinet, removed a rifle, and loaded it. He sent the disappointed spaniels back to their sofa and went up the stairs and outside, where he found Jon awaiting him.
“It seems strange to see you without your dogs,” the actor commented, looking at the empty places at Harry’s heels where the spaniels usually walked.
“They’d frighten the deer,” Harry returned. He rested his gun across his shoulder, said to Jon, “Let’s go,” and began to walk with long strides in the direction of the woods. Jon walked at his side.
29
I’m probably crazy, Tracy thought, as her steps brought her ever nearer to the lake. I should have stayed at home and read the paper. Now I’ll be late for dinner, and no one will know where I am, and Harry will worry.
But she didn’t turn around. The sense of urgency she had felt at the house was only deepening the closer she got to the lake.
A young deer stepped onto the path about twenty feet in front of her and for a brief, startled moment the two of them looked into each other’s eyes. Then the deer leaped into the woods, followed two seconds later by another, larger deer, probably the mother.
Tracy’s lips curved. She had never got over feeling honored whenever she caught a glimpse of one of God’s most lovely and graceful creatures. Not even growing up in Connecticut, where gardeners spent at least half their time trying, unsuccessfully, to deer-proof their flowers and greenery, had changed that feeling in her.
When finally she reached the lake, the peaceful scene in front of her belied the pulse that had started to beat urgently in her brain. The water was quiet as a mirror under the early-evening sun. The swan family floated serenely, elegant and lovely in the golden light
Some lines from Yeats came to her mind: “now they drift on the still water / Mysterious, beautiful…”
“The Wild Swans at Coole,” she thought. Symbols of unchanging beauty in a perilous world.
Were the swans on the lake in Charles’s day? she wondered. Were they watching, in their aloof beauty, when he was killed? Did the gunshot frighten them? Did they perhaps gather up their babies and hustle them into the safety of the overhanging willows at the edge of the water?
A downed tree trunk lay along the border of the woods, and Tracy went over to it and sat, her eyes still on the floating swans. Two brown ducks waded into the lake across from her and began to poke their heads into the water, looking for dinner. Birds called to one another from the greenery of the woods, and out of the corner of her eyes, Tracy saw a bunny hop into the safety of the trees.
It was such a peaceful picture. There was nothing whatsoever in the scene before Tracy to account for the pounding of her heart. She stayed where she was for ten minutes, unmoving, scarcely breathing, filled with an unbearable feeling of helplessness, waiting for something terrible to happen.
The swans continued to drift on the still water. The two ducks were joined by five or six others. Almost directly across from Tracy, two does came down to the lake for a drink.
Then she heard the sound of horses’ hooves, and in a moment, Charles, mounted on the big gray horse Tracy had seen him riding before, came out of the woods some fifty yards to her right.
Tracy stood up. No, she thought wildly. No! This can’t be happening. I can’t allow this to happen.
Charles had turned his horse to follow the lake path and was moving in her direction. He had given the gray its head, and the horse was walking along easily, his face turned toward the water so he could watch the ducks.
The picture they made was as perfect and as beautiful as a painting. The sun reflected off the man’s golden hair and the horse’s dappled coat, and the lake and trees made an ideal background to frame them.
Tracy’s pulse was pounding so hard in her head that it drowned out the sound of the birds, and she whirled and searched the woods with straining eyes. She saw the sun flash off what looked like a piece of metal, and she opened her mouth and screamed. The name she cried out, with all the power that terror could impart to her young and healthy lungs, was “Harry!”
There was no gunshot, and, when she spun back to look at Charles, he was gone.
Harry and Jon did not follow the bridle path to the lake, as Tracy had. Instead they went through the
woods, following the deer tracks that Harry knew so well.
The talked very little. Harry went first, carrying the rifle, and Jon came after, evincing little trouble negotiating the several steep grades they had to descend. As they approached the lake, Harry turned to say, “Show me where you found the deer and, if she isn’t there, we’ll search the immediate area first.”
“Right,” Jon returned. “Let’s go down to the lake path first, so I can get my bearings.”
Harry nodded and once again took the lead. They were perhaps twenty feet from the edge of the woods when a bloodcurdling scream ripped through the quiet air.
Harry’s head jerked around in the direction of the scream. A fraction of a second later he felt a powerful blow land on his shoulder, and he crashed to the ground. Intense pain shot down his arm, his fingers loosened their grip, and the rifle slipped out. Then Jon was on him, arm lifted to strike again.
Harry raised instinctive arms to defend himself, scarcely noticing the screaming pain in his shoulder as his adrenaline surged. He grabbed Jon’s arm as it descended toward his face and forced it back. For a long while the two men struggled, Jon trying to smash the sharp-edged stone he was holding into Harry’s skull, and Harry trying to push it back. Both of them were gasping for breath and perspiring heavily as they fought each other for the prize of Harry’s life.
On the surface it would appear that Jon held the advantage.
He was heavier and burlier than Harry, and he was uninjured. But Harry had spent his life riding thousand-pound horses, and his upper-body strength was much greater than his slim build suggested. Ever so slowly, that strength began to tell, as Jon’s arm was pushed farther and farther away from Harry’s head.
“Damn you, Silverbridge,” Jon said through clenched teeth, as he struggled to reverse the backward movement of his arm. Harry grunted and fought to maintain the advantage he had so far won.
Then a voice said strongly, “Get away from him, Jon, or I’ll shoot you.”
Both men froze.
“I’ll shoot you,” Tracy repeated. “Get away from him.”
Harry felt a quiver of indecision in Jon and took advantage of it by levering Jon’s arm farther back, then jumping to his feet. In a moment he had snatched the rifle from an extremely pale Tracy and trained it on Jon. He said, “You can drop that stone now, Melbourne. It’s all over.”
Jon’s face looked ashen. He let the lethal stone drop to the ground and said nothing.
“Was that you who screamed?” Harry said to Tracy, his eyes still on Jon.
“Yes,” she replied shakily.
“Well, you kept this bugger from landing that stone on my head instead of my shoulder. Good job, darling.”
Tracy’s body began to shake, too. “Oh God, Harry. I was so frightened. When I heard the noise of you fighting…”
“You very sensibly came along and nabbed the gun,” he said calmly, his eyes still on Jon. “Later you will have to tell me how you came to be here, but right now we have another matter to deal with.”
Jon’s hazel eyes had begun to glitter in the pallor of his face. He said intensely, “You’re a bastard, Silverbridge. I’m not sorry I tried to kill you. I’m only sorry that I failed.”
“What the hell have I ever done to you?’ Harry demanded in genuine bewilderment. “Is this about Tracy?”
“No,” Tracy said steadily from her place at his side. “I rather think it is about Dana Matthews, Harry.”
“Dana Matthews?” Harry scowled. “How the hell does Dana Matthews come into this?”
“Do you want to tell us, Jon?” Tracy said.
Jon looked at her grimly and did not reply.
“You were her brother, weren’t you?” Tracy said. Harry’s shoulder was aflame, but he kept the rifle trained on Jon and waited for him to answer.
For a long moment, it seemed as if he wasn’t going to reply. Then he said in a staccato-sounding voice, “I was her stepbrother. My father married her mother when Dana was eleven and I was fifteen.”
“Christ,” Harry exclaimed. He glanced at Tracy. “You mean this had nothing to do with Mauley after all?”
“The attacks on your life didn’t,” she replied. “They were separate from the burning of the stable, but we didn’t realize that. If we had, we might have tracked Jon down sooner.”
“You killed Dana,” Jon said with barely controlled passion. “She called you for help that night, and you didn’t answer. You let her die because it was the easiest way to get her out of your life. You deserve to die too, you bastard. She needed you, and you turned your back on her.”
“I wasn’t home when she called,” Harry replied.
“Right. That’s what you told the police. I’ll bet they didn’t even check your alibi, Lord Silverbridge.”
“It’s true,” Harry said steadily. “As soon as I got in, and got the message off the answering machine, I raced around to her place. Unfortunately, I was too late.”
“Unfortunately,” Jon sneered. “You dumped her. That’s the reason she took those pills. You dumped her and she was heartbroken and that’s why she killed herself.”
“I couldn’t help her, Melbourne,” Harry said, still speaking in the same steady voice as before. “I tried. Believe me, I tried. But she couldn’t break the cycle. She wanted the drugs more than she wanted anything else. More than she wanted me. More than she wanted her life. It was the drugs that killed her. Not me.”
“I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself, but that’s not the truth,” Jon said. The anger in his face was frightening.
Harry began to shrug, then inhaled sharply as the pain ratcheted through his shoulder. “You tried to kill me. You tampered with the brakes on my car, you tried to run me down in the hospital parking lot, you shot at me in the woods, and you just tried to bash my head in with a rock. You’re the one who’s going to be facing murder charges, Melbourne, not me.”
Jon took a menacing step toward him, and Harry lifted the gun, which had been sagging, to point directly at his heart. “I’ll blow you away, Melbourne. And, according to you, no one will even question me about it.”
Jon stopped.
Harry said, “All right. We are going to return to the house via the bridle path. You go first, Melbourne, and Tracy and I will follow. If you make even one suspicious movement, I’ll shoot. Now, we’ll go on down to the lake path and turn right so we can pick up the bridle path.”
Jon stood still
Harry gestured with the gun. “Move.”
Slowly, Jon turned and began to make his way down to the lake.
They were about halfway home when Harry’s shoulder gave out. “Do you think you can handle the gun?” he asked Tracy in a low voice.
She had been asking him to give up the gun for the last fifteen minutes, and replied patiently, “Yes. I told you I learned to shoot when I was making Sweet William. I am perfectly capable of holding and shooting that gun.”
Reluctantly, he handed it over to her. Then he cradled his right arm with his left hand and supported it against his chest. He exhaled with relief as the strain on his shoulder lessened.
Jon said sardonically, “Done some thinking, my lord?”
The two men’s eyes held for a brief moment before Tracy demanded, “What do you mean? Done some thinking about what?”
“Nothing,” Harry replied. “He’s just trying to make a distraction. Let’s go on.”
They had reached the place where the bridle path made a loop around a stand of grand old trees when Jon made his move. A flock of blackbirds flew overhead, cawing loudly, and he turned and bolted toward the cover of the trees.
Tracy lifted the gun to her shoulder, but she was too slow, and by the time she was in position to shoot, Jon was out of sight.
“Oh no!” she cried. “Come on, Harry. We have to catch him!”
She began to run toward the woods.
“No,” Harry said strongly. “Let him go.”
“What?” At the edge of the woods, she spun around to stare at him incredulously. “Are you crazy? The man tried to kill you. We can’t just let him go!”
“Yes, we can,” Harry returned.
“Well, you might, but I can’t,” and, still clutching the gun, she turned her back on him and started once more after Jon. It was with intense relief that she heard Harry coming after her.
Then his hand came down on her shoulder, spinning her around, and before she had quite realized what was happening, Harry had wrested the gun from her.
Tracy’s stomach began to chum, and her breathing got quicker and heavier. “What are you doing? Are you crazy? He’s getting away!”
“I want him to get away,” Harry said.
“Why?” She threw the word at him as if it was a spear.
He rested the rifle barrel on the ground. “Try to calm down and listen to me. I’ve been thinking the whole time we were walking. If I accuse Melbourne, and it comes out that it was about Dana—which it will have to—that whole mess will be stirred up again. I can just see the headlines now: Brother Tries To Kill Aristocratic Boyfriend.” His voice was deeply bitter. “And it will be even worse than the last time, because it involved Melbourne, who is Britain’s most respected actor, and because it involves you.”
She shook her head in disagreement. “That’s no reason to let him go, Harry! Suppose he tries to kill you again? You’re never going to be safe as long as that man is free!”
“I don’t think he’ll try anything again. You know about him, and if anything happens to me, he must know he will be arrested.”
“This is crazy,” she cried. “It’s something Charles might have done in the nineteenth century, chosen to cover up a scandal rather than prosecute a murderer. But this is the twenty-first century! We don’t do those things anymore. Give me that gun!”
He shook his head. “It’s too late, he’s gone by now. But I don’t think he’s going to go far. We can still have him arrested if that’s what we want.”
“What I want is for you to be safe, and for that to happen, Jon Melbourne needs to be behind bars.”
He stepped closer to her. “Tracy, think. You’re a movie star. You, of all people, must know how vicious the press can be.” He put his left hand on her shoulder and looked into her eyes. “I don’t want any more of it. It looks as if Meg will be able to go back to school for the next term, and she doesn’t need a lurid trial for attempted murder hanging over her. After all, all we can hope to accomplish is to wreck Melbourne’s career. Even if we can prove a case against him, he will only serve a few years.” Gently, he pushed a tendril of her hair off her forehead. “Luckily, he didn’t succeed in killing me, did he?”
He could see her struggling with his line of reasoning. “He tried to kill you,” she repeated. “He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”
He went back to cradling his right arm with his left hand. “If we lived in a perfect world, I would agree with you. But we don’t. We live in a very imperfect world, where there is as much gray as there is black-and-white. This is one of those gray areas. We have to ask ourselves: Will the good accomplished by letting Melbourne go outweigh the good that will be accomplished if we have him arrested? I think it will.”
She scowled, still not convinced.
“If this all comes out, our wedding will be hell. There will be reporters and photographers all over us, no matter where we go or how hard we try to hide.”