Dovecote

by Oleson, Anne Britting;

  “Follow the money is what I always say,” Giles said, his tone deliberate as he scowled into the bowl of his unlit pipe. “Follow the money. That’s a trail that always stinks.”

  Mr. Simms made a noise.

  “Am I wrong?”

  Despite the hay tangled in his thin hair, Mr. Simms managed to look a bit prissy and secretive as he pursed his lips. “I’m not at liberty to say what I know.”

  “Oh, Jamie,” Bel said, as though to a foolish and recalcitrant child.

  “So I’m not wrong,” Giles crowed. He turned to Gwynn and Colin, his black-currant eyes sharp and squinting. “That’s where you look to find out what’s up with Stokes. Find out what you can about his finances. I bet you find he owes a bit here and there. Probably more than a bit.”

  Gwynn nodded—the old farmer seemed to expect it—and felt her head throbbing; she knew that when the sun rose she’d have one hell of a hangover. Try as she might to accept his reasoning, she resisted Giles’ thoughts.

  Giles was watching her with interest, and a bit of disappointment. “This is a waterfront village, my girl. In case you hadn’t noticed. That cottage of yours, for better or worse, is a veritable gold mine. The owner—you, in this case—could sell out, or even just let out to folks from off, and come away from it with a hefty profit.”

  “And if Paul Stokes needs money—” Gwynn looked at Mr. Simms, his lips still pursed. He was, so obviously, not at liberty to say. “You’re not representing him, Mr. Simms. You’re representing the interests of my great-aunt, and by corollary, my interests.”

  “However, I might have dealings with other parties involved,” Mr. Simms said primly.

  “Oh, Jamie,” Bel said again. She handed him a cup of tea, plucked a bit of twig from the hair above his ear.

  “I’ll have a cup of that, my dear,” Giles said to Bel, waving a hand in the direction of the teapot on the table. He looked out the window into the farmyard, where the gray light of the pre-dawn shadowed everything. “Since there’s no point in toddling off to bed now.” He took the cup from Bel with a broad wink. After the first sip, he wiped his beard, and cocked his head. “It might be worth it to find out just how deep the money troubles go, if there are in fact money troubles behind this story. How far into the past they reach. Just in case our Paul Stokes had been biding his time waiting for the old woman to die.”

  Bel turned to him, her hands on her wide aproned hips. “That’s a terrible thing to say, Giles Trevelyan. Just terrible.”

  He looked up at her with his beady black eyes. “People are terrible, Isobel. You know that for a truth.”

  Bel turned away, disgusted; she bent over the refrigerator and shuffled foodstuffs before bringing forth a pair of white-paper-wrapped packages. “We’ll have breakfast, then.” She drew a bowl of eggs toward her on the countertop.

  Gwynn’s stomach roiled. “None for me, thanks, Mrs. Trevelyan.”

  “None for me, either,” Colin said. “I’ve got to be getting back down into the village. I’ve got a few jobs to tend to this morning, and unlike Giles, I’ll need my beauty sleep.” He stood slowly, holding out a hand to Gwynn.

  They said their good-byes, but Giles stood to see them out to the truck in the farmyard.

  “Just watch out for your cousin, our Gwynneth,” Giles warned, jamming his cold pipe once again between his teeth and leaning heavily on his stick. He looked up into her face, his dark eyes hard. “Just you watch out for him. Because if he’s in the trouble we think he might be, he might not have been simply waiting for your great-aunt to die.”

  “Giles, what are you saying?” Colin demanded sharply.

  But Giles had turned away, waving a hand over his head in farewell.

  “YOU WERE VERY quiet in Bel’s kitchen,” Gwynn said as they drove back onto Eyewell Lane and toward the village.

  “Listening,” Colin said.

  She glanced at him. There was a crease between his brows, and he seemed to be gripping the steering wheel as though he wanted to strangle it.

  “What conclusions has your listening brought you to?”

  His lips twisted. “Not good ones.” He slowed the truck as they neared the cottage. In the gray of early morning, the blue door seemed to float above the terrace. Colin, however, was looking at the shuttered front of The Stolen Child, and his frown seemed to harden. He shifted the truck into park and pulled on the handbrake before turning to her, and his gray eyes were dark, troubled. “Between all the things we know and all we don’t, I can’t see how you can stay in this cottage.”

  Gwynn snorted. “You’re not going to tell me you think I should leave.”

  Colin didn’t answer.

  “Besides, what does that even mean? ‘Between all the things we know and all the things we don’t’? What does that even mean?

  He skewed her a look. “I just don’t think it’s safe.”

  “I know how to lock a door, thank you very much.”

  “Some of the things here can’t be locked out, can they? They’re already inside.”

  “Stop it,” she said, shoving open the door of the truck roughly. “Just stop it.”

  Colin too got out, and crossed to her side. “Listen, I don’t necessarily want you to leave the cottage,” he said quietly, looking up at the house with a certain intensity. “I just want you to be careful.”

  “I can handle myself,” she retorted. “I’ve been doing it for years.”

  Colin reached out a hand to touch her lightly on the upper arm, then dropped it just as quickly. Still, she felt it, and winced.

  “I know. I know you can.” He sighed, and met her eyes. “I just don’t want you to have to swing any more rocks, all right?”

  She forced a smile. “All right.”

  Still, that feeling of foreboding stayed with her as she let herself into the house. She greeted Mary—who looked as though she had forsworn Bonfire Night parties for years, if not forever, and refused the cup of coffee Mary offered.

  “I need sleep, more than anything,” Gwynn said.

  Mary only tipped her head laconically.

  On the way up the stairs to the bedroom, though, Gwynn caught herself looking into the sitting room at the wing-backed chair, the one in which her great-aunt had died. She heard again Giles Trevelyan’s warning: he might not have been simply waiting for your great-aunt to die.

  28

  THE KNOCK STARTLED her. Despite having been working at the table before the window, she had seen no movement from the street, so engrossed had she been in the miniature on the block before her; she had made several unsatisfactory starts this afternoon. She leaned forward wearily and drew the curtain aside.

  A dark suit. A fedora?

  Gwynn made her way into the hall and snicked back the lock. She opened the door.

  Her visitor turned and winked. “Let me in off the street, young Gwynn, before someone sees me.”

  Dumbly she stood aside, waiting for Martin Scott to enter before closing the door again. In one hand he held a carry-all; with the other, he doffed his hat.

  “I’d tell you to lock it,” he said over his shoulder as he entered the sitting room, “but I know our Mary has a key.”

  “What—?” She followed him into the sitting room, where he’d set the carryall on the coffee table. “Mr. Scott—Martin—what are you talking about? Why are you here?”

  “Busted out,” he said, and laughed. “Have to be back before Mary knows I’m gone.” He settled onto the sofa, tucking his trousers up at the knee. He took a deep breath, and then blew it out. “Haven’t been out and about without a minder in I don’t remember how long. It feels good.” He unbuttoned his suit coat and eyed her speculatively. “You haven’t got a spot of whisky about, then, have you?”

  Gwynn shook her head, sinking slowly into the wing-backed chair. “They don’t know you’re gone. Mary. The visiting nurse?”

  “Damn right, they don’t.” His blue eyes sparked. “And don’t you be telling them, either.” He looked
up again. “Whisky?”

  “Tea?” she countered.

  Martin sighed mightily. “You’re as bad as our Mary.”

  Gwynn eyed him warily. “Are you supposed to be out?” She caught herself. “Of course you’re not.”

  If he could have spat, Martin would have. “I’m old, not senile, not sick. Definitely not bedridden. And now, thanks to you,” and he pointed at her with a bony finger, “I’m curious.” He lowered the finger to nudge the carry-all. “So I had that old battle-axe of a home health carer get the scrapbooks down from the closet shelf again, and didn’t she make a fuss.” Again his eyes darted around the room. “That tea, then, young Gwynn?”

  “Oh. Oh, sorry.”

  She slipped into the kitchen, where Mary had already laid the afternoon tea tray, as she always did before she left; all that was needed was a second cup and saucer. After the electric kettle came to a boil, Gwynn rinsed the pot, spooned in the tea, and poured the hot water over the leaves. Then she returned, tray in hand, to the sitting room. Martin shifted his carryall to the seat beside him, and she set the tray on the low table. He had, she saw, an album open on his knee. She turned back to the wing-backed chair, but a sudden guttural noise from him stopped her.

  “Don’t sit there,” he said quickly. His blue eyes were not on her but on the chair.

  She took a step back, and now she sank into the overstuffed chair at the other end of the sofa.

  “What is it?”

  He shook his head and didn’t answer. His jaw worked.

  “I was sitting in the chair earlier,” she protested.

  “And you looked good in it,” he answered, but automatically, as though from a distance. She saw his gaze still locked upon the wing-backed chair. For a moment he seemed to be wrestling, then he looked at her. His smile was forced. “I meant to say that earlier.” He cleared his throat. “Will you be mother, then?”

  Gwynn poured the tea carefully and handed him the cup and saucer.

  “Not English enough to put milk and sugar in first,” Martin observed, reaching for the tongs.

  “I’ve been away all my life,” she countered. “But you’re not getting off that lightly. Tell me why you didn’t want me to sit in the chair just now.”

  He pressed his lips together, dropping one sugar cube into the cup, then a second, as though sugaring his tea against shock. His eyes flickered to the chair, then back to the matter at hand.

  Then she knew, with a sudden realization.

  “You saw her,” she said.

  He lifted his tea cup to his lips and took a sip. He put it back down in the saucer, the china clinked a bit. Shaking? He placed them both on the low table.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Martin.” Gwynn took a sip of her own tea, black. “Don’t lie to me. You saw her. While I was in the kitchen.” She took another sip. “Maybe you still see her. Is she in the chair now?”

  Instead of answering, he folded his hands together and leaned back against the sofa cushions. “Is who in the chair?” he asked at last. Cagily.

  Gwynn had to place her cup and saucer on the low table to keep from throwing it at the old man’s head. “My great-aunt. The other Gwynn. The woman you used to be in love with. She was sitting in her chair while I was in the kitchen. Wasn’t she? And that’s why you didn’t want me to sit there.” She shook her head. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve seen her?” Martin countered. “Have you?”

  “Yes. Once. And heard her. Several times.” It felt good to admit it. “I’m not the only one. Colin has seen her.”

  “Has Mary?”

  “I don’t know. She hasn’t said.”

  Martin closed his eyes. “Probably she hasn’t. Too practical to be haunted, that daughter of mine. She misses a lot that way.”

  For a moment they fell silent, both watching the wing-backed chair. To Gwynn it looked perfectly empty. No one sitting there at all. But she was coming to learn that that meant nothing.

  “Yes,” Martin said at last. “She was there.”

  “She’s not now?”

  “No.” He sighed. “It was just for a moment.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  He turned his head quickly. “No. Does she speak to you?”

  “In dreams.”

  “You’re lucky, then.” Martin looked as though he meant it, looked as though the thought brought him sorrow. “I miss her. I miss her voice. I miss the way she moved. Even when she was alive. I missed her as soon as she married Tommy and he turned her into someone else.”

  With her eyes closed, Gwynn could almost imagine what her great-aunt would have looked like, sounded like, walked like as she moved across the dance floor toward a much younger Martin. She felt him place the scrapbook in her lap she looked down at the page to which he pointed.

  “That’s her,” he said, his voice low. “Down at the Palais.”

  It was the dance floor she had imagined, and the younger Gwynn was wearing the flowered dress with the puffed sleeves from the vision in her mind’s eye—but by now she scarcely even thought about the strangeness of that. She stared down at the girl waltzing in the arms of a barely recognizable Martin Scott in his uniform, her chin tilted up in the laugh she threw over her shoulder toward the photographer, her shoulder-length hair swinging about her face. In the way one recognized colors in black-and-white photographs, Gwynn knew the girl had red hair, knew the dress had blue flowers, knew the curtains on the long windows in the background were deep crimson.

  “She looks happy,” she whispered.

  “I thought she was,” he said sadly. “Then I was gone, and when I came back she was with Tom, and I don’t think she was ever happy again. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know how everything changed so quickly.”

  Again they fell silent. Gwynn looked down at the picture of her laughing great-aunt, feeling an unaccountable sorrow for a young woman who died long before her own death. She reached out a tentative finger to touch the black-and-white face, the laughing cheek, the bright eyes. What had happened? What happened, Gwynn?

  “Tommy,” Martin said, flipping the page quickly.

  Again the dancing couple, and off to the side and slightly back, another uniformed man had his eyes firmly on them. For a moment Gwynn stared in shock, seeing not eyes, but burning dark holes in the stranger’s face. She put out a hand, this time as if to ward off a blow, and the sorrow was replaced by fear, waves and waves of fear. Animal loathing, and a need to escape something that she knew she never would. There was screaming in her head; she pressed her hands to her mouth to keep the sound in, though she knew it was not her own voice she was hearing. What happened, Gwynn?

  The scrapbook slipped from her lap to the floor, and landed facedown on the worn carpet. Only then did she look up, to find Martin Scott watching her with his blazing blue gaze.

  “Steady on, young Gwynn,” he murmured. He put a hand on her shoulder.

  She jerked away convulsively.

  “DRINK IT,” MARTIN ordered sharply, pressing the glass into her hand.

  She raised it to her lips, and the smoky acridness filled her nose before spreading across her tongue.

  “Where—”

  “Cellarway, shelf overhead. I knew she had to have some here, and that seemed a logical place.” He glanced at her, up and down, appraisingly, then resumed his seat on the sofa.

  “You knew it was here all the time,” she whispered.

  Martin shrugged. “I’ll tell you about it sometime. But not now. Now you have to tell me about what you saw. After you drink the rest of that, I mean.”

  Gwynn’s eyes slewed to the scrapbook where it lay on the carpet. The pits of hell. She raised the glass to her lips and took a longer drink, letting the fire of the whisky burn its way down the back of her throat. It was a picture, she told herself. A photograph, sixty-some years old. With a dead man. It couldn’t hurt her. It couldn’t threaten her.

  Un
less she let it.

  She wouldn’t let it.

  She drank down the last of the whisky and set the glass on the table. Then she took a deep breath, and leaned forward to pick up the scrapbook, closed it carefully, and set it next to the empty shot glass.

  “I didn’t see anything,” she said slowly, “except Tommy’s eyes. And they scared me.”

  Martin nodded.

  “But I heard something.”

  Martin’s gaze hardened, his eyes narrowing. “What did you hear?”

  Gwynn took a deep breath. “Screaming. The word no over and over. A woman’s voice.”

  Martin looked stricken. “Was it Gwynn’s voice?”

  “I don’t know.” She pressed her hands to her face.

  “You do know,” he insisted. “Was it your great-aunt’s voice?”

  She nodded, biting her lip. “I think so. I think so. She was frightened. Maybe hurt.” She couldn’t bring herself to say the rest: she was sobbing.

  “Bastard.” Martin looked away, toward the chair, his hands clenched into fists on his knees. Gwynn could see him blink, once, twice, several times; his Adam’s apple worked up and down. She thought he might be crying.

  29

  “WHATEVER YOU DO,” Martin said, leaning quickly toward her as she held the door, “don’t tell Mary I’ve been here. She’ll tighten security if she finds I’ve been out.” He shook his head in disgust. “Thinks I’ll hurt myself, she does.” He was down the steps to Eyewell Lane with a surprisingly quick step; as he made his way along the pavement, he raised a hand in farewell, and Gwynn thought, under the fedora, his eyes were scanning the windows of the house.

  SHE TURNED AWAY from the front door and went back to the sitting room. The tea things on their tray still sat on the table; Martin had offered to help her clean up, but she had waved that suggestion away. The afternoon was drawing down, oppressively, and she needed something to keep her occupied; she didn’t think she could concentrate on the drawing any more. Now she stood, her gaze lifting beyond the table to the wing-backed chair.