Jenny said something polite. Mark edged forward.
Kenneth’s smile was a copy of his sister’s, except his was the dental-perfect gleam of a political candidate. His hair was a darker blond than Sharon’s, styled and blow-dried into obedience even the wind barely compromised. Perhaps Kenneth’s long, straight nose and square jaw were repeated beneath Sharon’s cosmetic mask, but Mark doubted it. And Kenneth’s large, dark, heavy-lidded eyes were his own. They were the eyes of a Byzantine emperor, somber and remote, a contradiction to his full lips and amiable drawl. “How’s it going? Have you found anything yet?”
“Some logs, some stones. Only a few pieces of the puzzle.”
“Puzzle? Everyone already knows what’s here. It’s really a shame the preservationists insisted we do an archaeological survey before building Victoria Square. I’m afraid we’re doing you a disservice, taking you away from important work—Jenny, isn’t it?” His query was addressed to her bosom.
“No excavation is unimportant,” Jenny answered, her voice crisp.
“Couldn’t prove it by me. I barely got out of Business Administration with a gentleman’s C.” Kenneth turned. “You must be Mark, from Austin.”
His handshake was so assertive that Mark grimaced. “I attend the University there, but I’m a Fort Worth native.”
“Return of the prodigal son? That’s great. Y’all are fixing to come to the reception tonight? Mother is expecting you.”
The implication was that Dolores would send out bloodhounds to track them down if they declined. But Mark really was eager to meet the materfamilias. “Wouldn’t miss it,” he said.
“I’ll show you around the Lloyd,” Kenneth said to Jenny, the angle of his shoulder excluding Mark. “Father’s collections are there now, you know.”
“Much obliged,” Jenny murmured. “Now, if you’ll excuse us….”
“Don’t let me keep you, Jenny,” said Kenneth. Again he took her hand and smiled. Mark expected him to start pitching beachfront property in Colorado, but he didn’t say anything more.
Two Air Force jets streaked overhead, their sound waves almost palpable. A grackle squawked. The Lexus purred away. In the sun-stippled shadow of her hat Jenny’s polite smile tightened into a sigh. Chin tucked, she considered her own admittedly splendid chest. “I was tempted to tell him the other one’s name is Sally.”
Mark’s guffaw at her comment collided with his gasp at the effect of the sigh on her T-shirt. The fabric with its Oxford University logo was discreetly loose, knotted at the hip, and Jenny herself was corseted properly enough to satisfy any maiden aunt. She wasn’t trying to be provocative, she had to breathe, after all. It was Kenneth Coburg who should have hidden his automatic testosterone alert. Mark cleared his throat and grinned.
Jenny’s answering laugh was a dry one, but it was a laugh. “Hop it,” she teased, jerking her head toward the garage trench.
He hopped and arrived just in time to keep the students from throwing away a turn of the century Coke bottle. “Even commercial artifacts have histories,” Mark explained. “Never move anything—context is very important. This bottle, you see, was somewhat beneath one of these cobbles; the bottom of it is a wee bit crushed. It gives us a terminus post quem. The cobbles can’t have been laid any earlier than the turn of the century.”
“The records can tell us when they were laid,” Amy protested, her lower lip pouting prettily.
“If you have written records,” said Mark, “you check them. But what would you do in a much older site, something B.C—before Coke?”
That was a thin joke, but the students giggled anyway. Mark showed Amy how to label the bottle, and Preston how to sketch it onto the plan. As the sun slumped into the west, the students’ hoes began to turn up bits of charcoal in the garage trench, the remains of the conflagration of 1975.
“Clear your loose!” Jenny called. “Clean your tools!”
Griping good-naturedly, they brushed stray grains of dirt away from the uncovered features, cleaned their tools and took them into the metal shed, and departed. Amy paused to ask if Mark knew of any books she could read—archaeology was basically dude stuff, you know. She fluttered her lashes at him, looking more like a puppy than a siren.
Mark recommended a couple of titles and watched Amy’s dirt-caked bottom and perky ponytail retreat toward the drive. Brazen little hussy. She should still be playing with Barbie dolls…. He and Karen, his former wife, had been Amy’s age when they had seduced each other in the back seat of his mother’s car and catapulted themselves into maturity.
Feeling middle-aged, Mark went to take a pollen sample from the cobbles; probably a flower bed had lain next to the old carriage house/garage. Beside him Preston labored, drawing board propped on his knee, tongue caught between his teeth, to plot the meandering line of stones so far revealed. Jenny leaned over him, her forefinger indicating a misplaced dimension. His correction earned a nod and a “Well done!”
A car entered the driveway through the haze of dust left by the students’ departing vehicles. Mark squinted. That really was Hilary.
He mopped at his face, but the dirt-caked sweat on it felt like sandy Vaseline and smeared rather than wiped away. His filthy clothes he could do nothing about; he pictured himself in a commercial, holding up a roll-on bottle and intoning, “For a real test of your deodorant, try archaeology.”
Hilary’s jeans weren’t as skin-tight as Sharon Ward’s, but she wasn’t as emaciated. Her “Phantom of the Opera” T-shirt wasn’t as loose as Jenny’s, but her figure was more willowy. The sunlight that had earlier seemed tarnished stitched Hilary’s brown hair with golden threads and lit her brown eyes like amber; the oppressive heat polished her complexion to an immaculate glow. How does she do that? Mark asked himself, and sounded the all-clear to his own testosterone alert. “Did you find something to wear tonight?”
“I didn’t get anything,” Hilary returned. “I have to learn to live on a budget. I already have a dress—no one here’s seen it before.”
Mark had mopped many a floor and sold many a fast-food burger before finally attaining a graduate fellowship. He modified his patronizing smile into one of welcome and started making introductions.
Preston stowed his pencil and shook Hilary’s hand. Jenny took off her hat and fluffed the hair matted on her forehead. “Nice to meet you, Hilary. You did the illustrations at Rudesburn, did you?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“Perhaps you could give the students some pointers.”
“Or this student some pointers, anyway,” said Preston.
“Sure, I’d be glad to.”
“I suppose you lot would like to see the house,” Jenny went on.
“Yes, please,” Hilary replied. Preston chimed in enthusiastically and tucked the drawing board under his arm. Making a forward-ho! gesture, Jenny led them off across the rubble.
Mark lagged a step behind. The odd diffused dazzle of the sun bleached Osborne’s bulbous shape of color and definition, so that it was no more threatening than a matte backdrop in some cheap horror movie. He shot a quick sideways glance at Hilary. Her lips were sketched as precisely as one of her own drawings. Last night they had not only yielded against his, but for one heady moment had suggested more than kisses. Despite the weakness—the nightmares—he’d admitted a few minutes earlier.
She glanced back at him with a straightforward smile, not a solicitous one. Unlike most women, Hilary acknowledged wounds without rushing hysterically around trying to bandage them.
Osborne’s lawn was threaded by mounds of earth, as though a crazed mole had been playing tic-tac-toe. A new underground sprinkler system, Mark noted. The roof of the porte-cochere was part shining copper, part weathered green. A new cement-block carport crouched incompatibly beside it, so far holding only Jenny’s rented Blazer. The tiny ligustrum bushes that lined the foundation seemed intimidated by the harsh lines they were expected to veil.
Jenny said, “Madame Coburg told me she made
a bargain with a contractor to send his people here when they weren’t working anywhere else. Renovations on the cheap.”
“If it’s by pinching pennies you get to be wealthy,” Preston mourned, “I’ll never make it.”
“Madame Coburg married her money,” said Mark.
“You don’t call her ‘Madame’ to her face, do you?” Hilary asked Jenny.
“Good heavens, no. She’s as fixated on first names as most Americans. No criticism intended.” Jenny bounded up the marble steps to the veranda, her reflection wavering in the beveled glass of the door. She stopped beside a metal plaque proclaiming Osborne House to be a Texas Historical Landmark, fished in her pocket, and waved a key chain at the ornamental excrescences of the house—sandstone trim, copper dadoes, gables, galleries, bay windows and tower. “Ground floor elevated and surrounded with a veranda, twelve foot high ceilings and nine foot high windows. Influenced by British architect Charles Locke Eastlake. Queen Anne style, it is, although I haven’t a clue why; poor Queen Nan went to her reward centuries before piles like this.”
“1890’s fascination with things British,” offered Hilary. “Like Vicky Mortensen catching herself a real English gentleman.”
Jenny chose one of three keys on the chain. The lock opened with a thunk. The portals swung wide. She waved her grubby straw hat as if it had a sweeping plume. “May I present the domain of clan Coburg? Check your weapons at the door.”
Gazing enraptured at Jenny, Hilary asked, “Snide remarks at twenty paces?” and walked inside.
Mark was left on the steps. He hurried across the veranda and plunged inside the house. The entrance hall was dark and cool after the windy sunshine outside, raising goose flesh on his arms and neck. A scent of mildew hung on the still air. A distant organ should have been throbbing Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue”, providing the proper atmosphere for a house haunted by murder, but the silence was absolute.
“No electricity in this part of the house,” said Jenny’s voice. “It has to be rewired to meet city codes before it can open as a restaurant. It could be months before the blackout’s lifted.”
A broad staircase resolved itself from the gloom. Bronze candelabra sprouted from the newel posts, and the railings were a rich mahogany that even a fingerprinted layer of dust and grime couldn’t conceal. The ceiling plaster was cracked, and wall sockets, decapitated of their lamps, bled wires.
The hall was paneled, wallpapered, painted, and gimcracked, every foot of space a frenzy of decoration. A huge hat rack stood in the angle of the stair. Small tables held dead ferns and crestfallen peacock feathers. The pendulum of a grandfather clock caught the light from the open door. Its slow tick-tock was as sonorous as water drops down a deep well.
Jenny frowned at the clock. It was almost five, Mark thought, and the reception was at seven-thirty. Briskly he shut the door.
Hilary picked up a leaflet from a windowsill and read aloud, “ ‘Longleaf pine paneling with cypress and mahogany trim. Aubusson and Kashan rugs. Paintings by Whistler, Sargent, and Corot. Vases, decorative pieces, and tableware by Sevres, Dresden, Meissen, Royal Worcester, Staffordshire.’ Dolores took the portable objects when she moved?”
“Oh yes,” Jenny replied, “more because they were valuable than because she liked them, I think. She told me she preferred contemporary furnishings, and had been—er—’chomping at the bit’ for years to get out of here.”
Mark had often driven by the new Coburg mansion, a sleek white ranch style iceberg, its visible eighth guarded by a brick and wrought iron fence. He imagined the interior filled with similarly cold leather and chrome.
“Helpful of Felicia to get murdered,” said Preston. “Gave Dolores a great excuse to build herself a new house.” Three pairs of eyes turned toward him. No one laughed, least of all Mark. “Oh—sorry. I forgot we were within feet of the murder scene.”
“Do you know where Felicia was found?” Jenny asked. “I certainly wasn’t after asking Sharon or Dolores.”
A little louder than necessary, Mark replied, “The parlor, where Vicky and Edward died. Through here?” He stepped firmly through a wide doorway, the others crowding his back.
Jenny opened draperies concealing French doors. Dust eddied in the sudden searchlight of sun. Hilary sneezed. The curtains were drooping, dispirited velvet, and the glass they covered was smeared and fly-specked. Hand-painted roses that had once been pink clambered up the wallpaper. The carpet might have been a century-old Aubusson, but it was so dingy it was hard to see any pattern. It was not stained with blood.
They stood in a semi circle around the ornate marble fireplace, its empty grate a yawn of indifference. Mark didn’t mention Osborne’s hypothetical ghost. Neither did anyone else.
Jenny turned and paced through another doorway. With a nervous grimace, Hilary followed. Preston tried to tiptoe. Mark felt creaky, like the tin man from The Wizard of Oz. Vicky and Felicia had both been “carved up like deli plates”—or so he had blithely told Jenny yesterday. Now he should be hearing footsteps behind him, walking through pockets of chill, or seeing knives and razors glittering in the corners of his eyes. But the house was inert, refusing to collaborate with his nightmares.
The conservatory was illuminated by keyhole windows. A mahogany table squatted in the center of the dining room beneath an intricate, cobweb-scummed chandelier.
“This door,” said Jenny, tapping wood panels, “leads to the kitchen.” Like the others, the door was so smothered in varnish that the carvings on its frame were only mysterious shapes.
The drawing room looked like the parlor, massive pieces of Victorian furniture shrouded with dust covers, rickety folding chairs and tables propped up against them. A baby grand piano dominated the music room. When Hilary lifted the lid and tried a scale, the discordant trill shattered the silence. She quickly lowered the lid.
Spindly rococo revival furniture was shoved against one wall, leaving the center of the room for a speaker’s lectern. Jenny explained, “Osborne was rented out for functions until Arthur died.”
Back to the entry they trudged, then climbed the staircase to a chorus of squeaks and groans from the wooden treads. The rooms upstairs contained four poster beds, armoires, more folding chairs. The bathrooms were porcelain museums, complete with claw-footed tubs and cabinet-enclosed toilets.
“I haven’t seen antique fixtures like these since Dunrobin Castle in Scotland,” said Hilary.
“I assume Dolores has plumbers laid on as well,” Jenny told her and added teasingly, “Spoiled your holiday by going to Scotland, did you?”
Hilary giggled. “Now, now, some of my best friends are Scots.”
The walls of one room were papered with the garish primary colors of Looney Tunes characters; it had been Sharon and Kenneth’s nursery. Mark wondered if they’d missed Osborne’s wide halls and the banister, just right for sliding, or whether they had been told for years not to play with the Dresden figurines or run their toy trucks across the carpets, and had been glad to leave.
Jenny opened a door on a narrow staircase. “Attics. Nothing there but jumble sale rubbish. Dolores wants to make it a craft shop.”
Arthur’s study was at the front of the second floor. The long room was airy despite its paneling, moss-green draperies, and flocked wallpaper; sunlight reflecting off glass-fronted bookcases made watery shimmers on the ceiling. “Arthur kept this office after his family moved,” said Jenny. “This is where he wrote his books and gave his interviews.”
Preston, Hilary, and Mark, academics all, were already inspecting the bookcases. The contents ranged from leather bound classics to colorfully jacketed editions of Arthur’s own books. “He willed the manuscripts and letters of various literary figures to the library at the University of Texas,” Jenny said.
“And the Regensfeld artworks?” asked Hilary. “They were here, too?”
“Over there.” Jenny pointed toward an etched-glass cabinet.
Very gently Hilary opened the door and peered w
ithin. But the cabinet contained only dust and shadow.
Across from the fireplace Jenny stood near an open Wooten desk, its multiple pigeonholes filled with tidy stacks of paper. Certificates of honors and keys to cities around the world hung above it. Jenny opened and shut one of the drawers. “Dolores hired Nathan Sikora from the Lloyd to collate Arthur’s papers, with an eye to a biography. She told him not to start until she could interest a publisher, though. So she doesn’t have to pay him until she can get her investment back.”
“Nathan Sikora,” Hilary said. “I know him. Or at least I’ve written to him. He’ll be my boss.”
Jenny nodded. “Lucky you. He’s a good man.”
Comes up to your standards, does he? Mark asked silently.
The walls all the way into two bay windows and out again were covered with photographs of Arthur with tigers, yaks, and Komodo dragons, of Arthur with dignitaries from Dwight Eisenhower to Groucho Marx, and of Arthur with exotically dressed people in geographical sites so far-ranging that Mark wouldn’t have been surprised to see him posing with a group of Martians beside the Vallis Marineris.
Then there were the photos of Dolores—as a bride, with two children, with two adolescents, as a mature woman. She had aged gracefully. Good bone structure, no doubt, and the help of an army of dieticians, hairdressers, and plastic surgeons. Mark eyed a large oil portrait of mother and children, the three blond heads tilted together like conspirators sharing a secret.
“Felicia had no children,” said Jenny. “Doubtless fertility was one of Dolores’s attractions. Arthur’s libido must’ve been positively inspired; they married in 1961 and Kenneth was born nine months and two weeks later.”
“No pictures of Felicia here,” Preston said. “None of Arthur’s parents, either. Although I’ve seen some at the Historical Society. All the men look alike, long nose and deep-set eyes.”
Jenny opened a door in the paneling that led to a short flight of stairs. A green and gold glow like that of a forest in June spilled downward, sunlight filtered through four magnificent Tiffany windows. An easy chair and a table with a lamp were the tower room’s only furnishings. An inexpensive spiral notebook and a Time magazine dated July 1988 lay on the table.
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