“The way your father talks to your mother?”
“You got it.”
“Come on, can you really see yourself in that kind of relationship?”
“That’s just it, isn’t it? I can’t.”
“But you’re assuming Michael can? You and he are talking different languages—in more ways than one, dinna ye ken.” Rebecca laughed. “It’s a matter of faith,” Mark went on, “like we were talking about the other night. Do you have enough faith in him to trust him to do right by you? And vice versa—can he trust you not to dump on him?”
“Something to be said for biting your tongue,” Rebecca admitted. “Although I’ve been doing that an awful lot already.”
Mark nodded abstractedly. “Haven’t we all?”
The tour bus gathered its passengers. Bridget ran out of the Craft Centre carrying a package, which she handed in through a window. The bus belched exhaust, rumbled up the street, and turned toward Melrose.
She would talk to Michael after supper, Rebecca resolved. They couldn’t let this fester. They’d settle it tonight. “Mark, you’re a gentleman and a scholar.”
“I can dish it out. I can’t necessarily take it.”
She looked askance at that. “Do you have siblings?”
“Half-siblings, a couple of little people in grade school. My mom’s second marriage.”
“Divorce?”
“One of the messiest. They might as well have torn me apart on a rack. Ten years ago—I was fifteen.” His face hardened. “I cut up pretty rough for a while. Acting out, the counselors said. Then—well, something happened that snapped me out of it.”
Rebecca looked discreetly away. Yes, everyone had a skeleton in his closet. So Mark had been in counseling. No wonder he could dish it out.
Footsteps scrambled over the floor of the church. Mark and Rebecca leaped up. Sheila burst out of the door and for a moment clung to the wall, her bosom heaving photogenically. Her wild-eyed glance to right and left didn’t register the people staring at her. With an inarticulate cry she looked back over her shoulder and fled across the lawn to the bridge, ran across it and achieved the hotel in mere seconds.
Mark and Rebecca looked at each other. No Tony, no Dennis, no camera. Her terror might actually have been genuine. They looked through the door, Rebecca expecting at least a squad of zombies. Bars of sunlight lay across the floor. William Salkeld’s effigy slept peacefully. The grille in the tower door was closed. A couple of jackdaws hopped over the supply table.
“She never struck me as one who’d spook easy,” said Mark.
“I hope she saw the ghost,” Rebecca replied. “Poetic justice.”
Mark cocked his head to the side. “Like the poetic justice of her seeing Michael in love with you?”
“Is it that obvious they had a—well, they knew each other?”
“I’m the cynic, you know. I expect the worst.”
Rebecca nodded. “An object lesson, then; don’t let her wriggle her way into your past.”
“Oh, a Twinkie can be pretty tempting,” Mark grinned. “A nibble even tastes good. But you know if you eat the whole thing you’re going to make yourself sick. Sheila makes you appreciate a nice modest girl like Hilary.”
A cool breeze stirred the willows and fanned Rebecca’s face. The sun drifted westward in a sky swept clean of haze. The multicolored flowers in the village gardens glistened like seed catalog advertisements. The green of the lawns and the trees were a new definition of the color, more intense than any Rebecca had ever seen, reflecting hazel in Mark’s gray eyes.
They were on the bridge when they heard the singing. Women’s voices rose and fell, at one moment lifted on the breeze, at the next evaporating into the sunlight. “Pater noster qui es in caelis sanctificetur nomen tuum adveniat regnum tuum…”
“… thy will be done,” Rebecca continued, “on earth as it is in heaven. “ She quickened her pace, Mark on her heels. “Did Sheila see the nuns going into the choir for vespers?”
“I’m not sure I really want to know,” he answered. “So far I’ve done real good with denial.”
Back in the cottage, Rebecca discovered she was wearing Hilary’s boots. She took them off and set them neatly down. In the bedroom, Michael’s dirty jeans lay on top of his dirty shirt. Gathering them up, she took them toward the back entry and the laundry basket. She could hear Adele’s voice before she reached the kitchen. “… hard to believe anyone could be that unsympathetic to such an aura. All you have to do is walk into the church and you feel it. The relics demand respect, they sense disbelief. They avenge disbelief.”
Adele stood chopping vegetables, the long knife snicking up and down like a guillotine. Chunks of carrot and potato lay like heads piled below the scaffold. Maybe she envisioned Sheila’s head among them.
Michael stood over the stove browning stew meat, his face as glazed as though it were pressed against a window, but whether from Adele’s relentless certainty or from the same light-headedness Rebecca felt, she couldn’t tell. At least the explosion had cleared her headache. She threw his clothes into the basket and asked, “Can I help?”
“We’ve got it, thank you,” he returned. His eyes never left the pot. His voice had an edge to it. Probably he’d unbent his stiff spine long enough to follow her outside, and had seen her confiding in someone else. Great. Tiptoeing through the embers of their argument, Rebecca went back to the bedroom and ransacked it for the sgian dubh. It wasn’t there. She checked the sitting and dining rooms. Still nothing. He must have left it at the dig. Odd, though, he took such good care of it, always wiping it off and replacing it in its sheath.
The meat was tough, the vegetables underdone, but no one complained. The few bites of stew Rebecca managed to get down lay like a bowling ball in the pit of her stomach. Look at me, she ordered Michael silently. Just look at me, so we can start making up.
He played with his food, his downcast face obscured by his hair and by thought. He took his plate to the kitchen, muttered to no one in particular, “It’s a grand evenin’,” and walked out of the house.
Rebecca followed. She got as far as the front step and stopped dead. Michael and Sheila stood next to the Plantagenet van. If Sheila had been frightened a little while ago, she was back to her old self.
Michael was half-turned away from her, as though she’d grabbed his arm as he strode by. Even as Rebecca shrank back against the door, her heart congealing, Michael shook away Sheila’s hand. She leaned toward him, smiled, and spoke. One enameled fingertip traced a line down his shoulder blade.
He flung her hand away. His scowl would have intimidated a battalion of redcoats.
But Sheila was made of stern stuff. Unfazed, she went on talking. Her scarlet lips moved as if they were independent of her face, caterpillars voraciously consuming everything within reach.
Michael grasped her upper arms. Her hair flew around her face. His voice rose and his words sliced the evening peace. “You filthy bitch, let me be! Let us be!”
“Or else?” Sheila’s lips might have said. Despite his scowl, she still smiled at him as though she sat across from him in a cocktail lounge and sipped delicately from some fruity drink.
He threw her away from him with such force that she smacked against the side of the van. He strode across the car park and disappeared around the side of the Craft Centre, fists clenched at his sides, shoulders braced as though under the weight of armor.
Sheila leaned against the van. Rebecca hoped she was hurt. She was afraid she was hurt, because if she was, Michael had been the one to hurt her.
Sheila straightened, fluffed her hair, and smoothed her blouse. She saw Rebecca on the step. For one crazy, careening moment the glossy photograph of her beauty ripped in half. Her face went as emptily, sharply hungry as that of a child in a famine relief poster. Her eyes raked Rebecca with a look compounded of anger and envy and desperation. Then, before Rebecca quite realized what she was seeing, Sheila began laughing. She squared her shoulders, and
marched off like a soldier to the cadences of a brass band.
Rebecca staggered into the bedroom. “Can’t you leave him alone, Sheila?” she demanded of the blank faces of the beds. “Haven’t you done enough? I wanted to hate you, and you won’t even let me do that!”
Haven’t I done enough? she asked herself. Sheila’s face was etched on her mind like the image on a photographic negative. Had Michael ever seen her disemboweled like that? Had he ever heard the peculiar ghastly jollity of that laugh?
Steady on, she told herself. She sat down and forced herself to breathe deeply, counting each exhalation. The bowling ball in her stomach deflated. When her hands stopped trembling, she got out a darning needle and the skein of yarn. She’d mend Michael’s sweater while she waited for him to calm down, while she waited for the world to settle back into its ruts.
Adele’s voice, saying something about the Egyptian book of the dead, came from the hall. Dennis responded politely. The front door shut. Splashes, clinks, and chatter echoed from the kitchen as Mark washed the dishes under Hilary’s supervision.
Rebecca stared at the sleeve of the sweater; half the stitches unraveled in her hand. Well, damn! She couldn’t do anything right today! Caroline could fix it, but Rebecca would not let Michael take it home to her and whine, “Look what Rebecca did, Mum.” Maybe Hilary could help.
Rebecca arrived in the kitchen door to see Mark offering Hilary a taste of his precious salsa. He’d brought the bottle of tomato, pepper, and onion sauce with him, rightly assuming that British food would be too bland for his Texan palate. Rebecca envisioned the male bird bringing the female a toothsome bit of worm. Courtship had its moments.
Hilary sniffed at the spoonful of lumpy red stuff. “Kinda spicy.”
“You can take it.” He held the spoon to her mouth.
She nibbled, swallowed, and exhaled through purse lips. “Oh my.”
Mark considered those lips, bent his head, and kissed them.
Hilary’s entire body jerked with shock. “No, don’t!” She pushed him away and ran up the stairs. The spoon clattered onto the floor. Mark looked after her, stunned.
Rebecca ducked around the corner before he could see her. Hilary’s expression hadn’t been coy, playing hard to get. It hadn’t been insulted. Her face had been filled with despair, leavened by a hint of the same panic that had contorted Sheila’s features at the church door.
Oh God. What had happened to Hilary to make her react like that? Rebecca went back into the bedroom. What a comedy of errors. What a Shakespearean tragedy. The front door slammed. Then the back door.
The evening outside the window was indeed grand. She might as well walk up to the Craft Centre and ask Bridget for help with the sweater. Better than sitting here brooding over Michael and Sheila, Mark and Hilary, motive and opportunity and skeletons in closets. Rebecca secured the loose stitches, put the garment and the yarn into a plastic bag, and walked outside.
Across the stage set of the village, the Johnston children were chasing a soccer ball. Winnie shook a rug out of an upper window. Laurence walked across the street from the Craft Centre to the hotel. Elaine came hurrying out, brushed by Laurence, climbed into the Jaguar, and went roaring off toward Jedburgh. Compared to the clean shine of the sun, the lamps in the van were only counterfeit light. Two shapes moved in their gaudy glow. Dennis chirped breathlessly; Tony replied in monosyllables. Rebecca wondered why Tony stayed with Sheila, whether film jobs were that hard to find.
She trudged up the driveway. The toy shop was next to the hotel. From the step of the Craft Centre, across the street, all she could see in its window was the face of an antique clock. But she’d looked in that window often enough to visualize its contents. She wouldn’t mind having a teddy bear wearing tiny wellie boots herself, especially the one in the tweed deerstalker. And the Coldstream Guards, with their scarlet uniforms and bearskin hats like rows of red ants ordered behind their Queen, were enough to tempt anyone.
The clock read eight o’clock. Maybe by nine Michael’s rage and frustration would’ve burned themselves out, and they could start shoveling away the cinders of their argument.
Rebecca went inside and approached Bridget. “Why of course,” the woman said. “Sit you doon, we’ll sort it oot.”
By the time Bridget announced nine o’clock, closing time, Rebecca felt much better. The sweater was fixed, and under Bridget’s tutelage she’d done most of it herself. Everything was going to be all right. She emerged into the street clutching her bag and saw Hilary standing in front of the hotel. “Hi!” Rebecca called. “Is everyone in the pub?”
“Only Jerry,” the girl replied, her brow furrowed with irritation. She gazed down at her fancy designer shoes. “I was looking for Mark.”
Rebecca glanced curiously at her. Maybe Hilary wanted to apologize for her abrupt rebuff in the kitchen. Good—Mark hadn’t deserved that reaction to his kiss, even if he had accidentally reopened an unhealed wound.
Michael hadn’t deserved what he’d gotten, either. He was probably there in the cottage looking over the day’s printouts… . Blast. She’d never picked them up. Shaking her head—sometimes it was hard to remember that archeology was the reason they were all there—Rebecca asked Hilary, “Would you like to walk over to the church with me? I left the printouts.”
The west front of the church reflected the twilight, inscrutable. The wheel cross shouldered its way from the turf. The walls of the priory lay in rocky knots, tensely, across the lawn. In the rising wind, the leaves of the beeches behind the hotel whispered secrets to each other.
Hilary said, “It’s pretty spooky over there in the evening.”
“That white shape we keep seeing is the resident owl”, Rebecca told her, forcing a light tone.
“Really?” They walked toward the bridge that carried Jedburgh Street across the Gowan Water. Grant Johnston, clad in civilian shirt and flannels, was standing in his garden admiring a magnificent display of pink and blue delphiniums. He exchanged waves with the women.
“And what was Jerry up to?” Rebecca asked.
Hilary snorted. “He bought me a glass of wine, in exchange for which I had to listen to him imply that if a man doesn’t—er—use a woman regularly then his metabolism and his intellectual processes suffer. I sat there smiling and playing dumb. Do you think he was making a pass at me?”
Rebecca laughed. The laugh felt good. “Sure he was. Good show, to pretend you didn’t understand him. I thought that line had died a justifiable death years ago. Trust Jerry to still be back in Neanderthal times.”
The stream gurgled past the bridge, willow branches teasing its burnished surface. The silver Jaguar purred past the priory wall and onto the bridge, Elaine gesturing acknowledgement as she passed.
“Maybe she told Jerry off,” suggested Rebecca. “That was why he was window-shopping tonight.”
“I almost told him to go find Sheila,” Hilary said, “but I thought that would be tacky. You almost have to feel sorry for her.”
“The poor little girl looking for love in all the wrong places?” Rebecca didn’t say that as caustically as she would have a few hours ago.
“I just don’t understand how she can make such a K-Mart special out of herself. I bet she’s been with—well, several men. How can she stand it?”
Perhaps it was the ambiguous evening light that made Hilary look so green around the gills. Not that Rebecca herself had been terribly sophisticated at Hilary’s age of twenty-two, but she was beginning to fear that the girl was less an example of arrested development than the victim of a disastrous relationship. That didn’t give Rebecca the right to pry into Hilary’s past, however. “Depends on what Sheila’s been getting out of it,” she said carefully, and Hilary replied with a shrug.
Across the stream the village was muted by dusk and by the fragrant smoke curling from various chimneys. Bright squares of windows defined the hotel from skylights to front door. Next to the lighted van the headlights of the Jaguar went off, an
d the ceiling light came on as Elaine opened the door. The cottage windows blazed. Dennis was probably propped on his bed reading one of the science fiction novels Michael had lent him. The tenuous chords of a guitar drifted from the open window of the sitting room.
The lawn beyond the gatehouse was so noiselessly soft that Rebecca felt as if she were floating. On the porch of the church, the cats sat still as stone gargoyles. Hilary bent to pet Guinevere. Guinevere hissed and scratched at her and she jumped back. Lancelot arched, his tail standing up like a bottle brush. As one they turned, fled out of the light, and were swallowed by darkness.
Rebecca looked at Hilary, who bit her lip. They peered in the door. A tenuous light flirted with grasping shadow. The grass in the nave was a deep malachite green. The rims of the granite sarcophagi sparkled with bits of mica. Their depths were filled with darkness as tangible as water. Taking a deep breath, Rebecca plunged into the building, rushed to the chancel, seized the printouts from their box and hurried back, her steps reverberating from the roof.
Hilary was looking down into one of the tombs, so stiff and still that Rebecca’s neck contracted. “What is it?”
“There’s something in there,” Hilary said. Her voice, stretched thin and fine, broke with an upward quaver.
Rebecca stepped up beside her. A white shape lay in the stony embrace, a woman wearing a white habit. Her eyes glowed.
Anne Douglas. The sack and the rolls of paper fell from Rebecca’s nerveless fingers and thudded softly on the grass. Her heart did a backflip into her windpipe. “No,” she gasped. Her knees gave way and dropped her on the cold stone rim. “No.” The woman’s eyes were covered by two round, faintly shining objects. Two gold nobles. Below them red lips parted in a grimace of pain. The breath of the sarcophagus carried not only the odor of musty stone, but also that of a rich perfume and of something warm and sickly.
The sunlight faded. The shape, the woman, remained utterly silent, horribly still. Her hands were crossed on her breast. The fabric beneath the clutching, red-taloned fingers wasn’t white but dark. Red, Rebecca thought. Like the lips, like the nails. Red as blood. Red with blood. “It’s Sheila,” she said, her own voice harshly loud. “I think she’s dead.”
Dust to Dust Page 12