“Thanks,” said Sharon with her knee-jerk smile, and continued back toward the driveway, Kenneth several paces behind.
Travis thrust two slips of cardboard at Mark. “Here, show that little egghead gal of yours how real people live. Cutting horse trials at the Coliseum tonight—finals next Friday. And the horses don’t smell at all—Kenneth’s two bricks shy of a load.”
“Thank you,” Mark said.
Travis considered a moment, then pulled out another pair of tickets and poked them toward Preston. “Don’t know if you folks like this kind of thing, but, what the hey….” He turned and scrambled after Ken and Sharon. Preston stuffed the tickets into his pocket, his face suffused with something between laughter and weary resentment.
Dolores smiled graciously. “It’s all very impressive, Jenny. We’re so lucky we have you to run things. If you’ll excuse us, we need to check on the workmen.” Trailing a faint whiff of her signature perfume, she led Vasarian toward Osborne House, her sweeping gesture commenting on the painters working on the gingerbread trim. He bent over her, asking questions, the rest of him having jetted in from Carpathia to give her his full attention.
“Is that an imperial ‘we’?” Jenny asked under her breath, “Or is Mr. Vasarian as keen on real estate as art?”
Mark picked up the box containing the week’s haul of artifacts from the garden: bits of harness, lead shot, coins, buttons, broken pottery, worked wood, the meat and fish bones of main courses past, rusty nails, and barbed wire. The garage was so far producing only charred lumps, but then, Jenny’s trained X-ray vision saw treasure even in those.
Two more cars came up the drive. Hilary emerged from the first one juggling two boxes of pizza. Nathan shut the door of the second and stood in bemused appreciation as Sharon maneuvered her miniskirt into the Lexus.
“Looks like they’re trying out for The Blue Angel, the professor and the hooker,” Mark whispered.
“Guess so,” said Hilary, with studied indifference.
The Lexus skidded onto York Boulevard right in front of a delivery van, which honked a protest. Preston took his leave and followed, his middle-aged import departing much more sedately. Shaking his head, Nathan picked up a paper sack and joined Jenny, Mark, and Hilary.
The painters gathered their buckets and tarps. A group of carpenters banged down the steps. Outside the kitchen door a gray bird bounced back and forth, wings fluttering, squawking at Graymalkin who was huddled on the edge of the step. “What’s that bird on about?” Jenny asked.
“It’s a mockingbird,” explained Nathan. “It’s teasing your cat. Natural selection at work—the only mockingbirds that survive are the ones fast enough to tease and get away.”
Graymalkin shuddered, fur erect, eyes huge yellow globes. Her tail switched once, twice. Suddenly she was no longer at the edge of the step but three yards away, a feline missile impacting the exact spot where the bird had been. But the bird had already somersaulted onto the roof and was continuing its tirade. “Nyah, nyah, nyah.” With infinite dignity Graymalkin stretched, licked down her fur, and padded nonchalantly toward the house.
Jenny opened the door, ushered everyone inside, and tossed her hat in her bedroom. She nodded toward a cardboard box on a chair by the hearth. “I collected all the papers that were in the attic for you, Nathan—it’d be a right nuisance to suss out the place after dark.”
“Thank you,” Nathan replied. “I’ll have to come early to clear out the study—that’s where most of the documentation is, anyway.”
Mark laid the pizzas on the table. Arthur had died in the study, true, leaving his autobiography barely begun. But the rest of his life’s work was over, and his death had been a natural one. It was the memory of terror and pain and sudden obliteration that possessed the house…. Mark looked around the cheerful kitchen and told himself he’d seen the very death room, and nothing was there. Even so, the back of his neck itched, as though some malevolent spirit were playing-hide-and seek with him.
“Tea?” Jenny asked. “I’ve kept some cold for you lot.”
“You don’t think iced tea is the equivalent of spitting on the Union Jack?” returned Hilary.
Jenny laughed. “When in the hinterlands, indulge the barbarians.”
“You any relation to that mockingbird?” demanded Mark.
“I’ve had a lot of practice dodging.” Jenny filled four tall glasses and set them on the table. “Don’t wait for me. I have to feed my familiar.”
Out of respect for Nathan, Hilary had brought vegetarian pizza. She doled it out while Graymalkin cavorted around Jenny’s feet and then settled down to her bowl, crunching happily. A door slammed in the front of the house. Jenny peered out the window over the sink. “Alone at last—Madame and her familiar are leaving.”
“I’d say she was more interested in Vasarian than he is in her,” said Hilary around a mouthful of mushrooms and olives.
Nathan added, “He’s asked several questions about you, Jenny. Should I hint that you’re interested?”
Jenny’s back was still turned. Her shoulders stiffened and her hands closed into fists against the porcelain sink. “What did he ask?”
“Oh, where you were from, where you got your degrees, if you were related to an historian named Pamela Galliard—she used to work for the National Trust, I think he said.”
“English Heritage, a similar organization.” Jenny’s hands relaxed. She turned on the water and washed them. “Pamela Galliard was my mother. Fairly prominent in her field, restoration and preservation. Flattering but not surprising that Vasarian would know her work.”
“Was?” Hilary asked softly.
“She died two years ago. Motor accident—she was hit by a car at a traffic junction in Waltham Cross. Left a book, her magnum opus, unfinished.”
“I’m sorry,” said Hilary, and added under her breath as if chasing the tail of a thought, “Waltham Cross….” She must have lost it. “And your father?”
“I’m an orphan. Straight out of Dickens.” Jenny threw down the towel, pulled out a chair, and took a piece of pizza. Her dark eyes fixed Nathan with an ironic gleam worthy of Vasarian himself. “No, I’m not interested. Mr. Vasarian is not my type.”
Who is? Mark wondered. He sincerely hoped Jenny’s sumptuous body hadn’t lived the life of a cloistered nun. What a waste. He took another piece of pizza.
Sunlight gleamed through the windows, vanished, and gleamed again like pink gold as the clouds thickened in the west. At last the sun disappeared for good, as did the pizza. Mark gathered up the empty boxes and took them out to the garbage can beside the back porch. The evening was a hazy gray, and the lights of the cars on York Boulevard seemed like UFO’s, distant and mysterious. The damp wind shifted the leaves around his feet.
He went back inside to the scent of coffee, and reclaimed his chair at the table just as Jenny pronounced the new shade of Sharon’s hair “strawberry tart”. She smiled sweetly when Mark and Hilary got the double meaning.
Nathan, a certified gentleman, ignored it. Hilary glanced at him and changed the subject. Jenny’s tongue could be a bit tart itself, Mark thought, although invariably entertaining.
The warm kitchen and the British voice reminded him of Rudesburn. Even though Jenny’s accent wasn’t Scottish but Oxbridge English, broadened just enough to betray her West Country home, the scene was sufficiently nostalgic to have mellowed him out. But tension crawled up his spine and laid cool fingers on the back of his neck. A soundtrack played ominous chords in the back of his mind, so that he almost expected a shark’s fin to break through the polished floorboards and rows of sharp teeth to seize his ankle and pull him into the dank, dark cellars.
Hilary arranged and rearranged crumbs on the tabletop. Nathan stared at the back of the computer. Graymalkin bounded into an empty chair and started washing her face. She was filling out, but was still small; her ears were so big her face looked like a bat’s. Jenny watched her, the affection in her eyes fraying around something
hard and sharp.
The coffeepot emitted a sigh of steam, and everyone jumped. The house didn’t have to be haunted, Mark told himself; everyone just had to believe it was.
Jenny served the coffee. Nathan emptied his paper sack onto a platter, revealing chocolate chip cookies made by his grandmother. The ensuing blitz made the California Gold Rush look tame.
“Delicious!” Hilary exclaimed. “Is your grandmother a character from Fiddler on the Roof—a little round person with granny glasses and a shawl?”
“No way,” said Nathan. “She’s round, yes—who wouldn’t be, the way she cooks—but she wears polyester pants suits and is on the national bridge tour.”
Mark let the confection melt on his tongue. Chocolate was the most benign of drugs. “You’re a native Texan, Nathan?”
“Fourth generation. My ancestors got out of Russia just ahead of a mob of Cossacks and opened a dry goods store in Galveston. I was born here.”
“So was I. One of my earliest memories is of Felicia’s murder.”
“Mine too,” said Nathan. “It was spring break, I was home from college. My father was one of Arthur’s defense lawyers, so I know more about the murder and the trial than I’d really like. My life has been measured out in Coburgs.” He glanced toward the partially open door connecting the kitchen with the front of the house, as though Felicia’s corpse might come tottering through it, and took another cookie. “Well, I need to be going. I’ll have to rush to get to services on time. Thanks for the box of goodies, Jenny. Even old receipts can be useful. I’ll tackle the study tomorrow.”
“What if you find old love letters?” Hilary asked. “I mean, from someone other than Felicia or Dolores. Will you tell?”
“As exciting a life as Arthur had—determined to prove himself, I think—I’d expect him to have had several love interests besides his wives. Or maybe I should say lust interests. By all accounts, Kenneth’s somewhat lecherous tendencies are hereditary.”
“No harm in appreciating the female of the species,” said Mark. Nathan grinned in agreement.
Jenny told them both, “There’s appreciation, and there’s devaluation. I’m not sure Kenneth knows the difference. He followed me here from the reception Tuesday night. I had to turf him out.”
Aha, Mark thought, remembering the second figure in the window. Ken probably tried to seduce all his female employees, in some kind of wealth-equals-power-equals-dominance ritual. Mark silently thanked Jenny for warning Hilary.
“He did go away,” Hilary said into her cup. “That’s okay.”
Nathan stood up. “I’m going to ask Lucia Hernandez some questions I wouldn’t ask Dolores. Not just about Arthur’s love life, but about Felicia. For example, the findings at the trial were that Felicia surprised a thief here at Osborne, but no one ever decided why she was here to begin with, especially on a night Dolores and the kids were out of town.”
“Not surprising she’d try to avoid Dolores,” said Jenny.
“The divorce was quite civilized, considering,” Nathan told her.
Mark said, “It was Felicia who interested Lucia in heritage roses.”
“Heritage roses?” asked Nathan.
“Antique roses, varieties dating back a hundred years or more. Collectors swarm over homesteads and cemeteries looking for the old stock. Antiques grow wild—they’re a lot hardier than modern hybrids. I’ve put in many an hour in Lucia’s garden. Good digging practice.”
“I’d be glad to trim a rosebush or two in exchange for an interview.” Nathan hoisted his box from the chair. “Thanks, Mark, for paving the way for me. Lucia’s involved in the Fiesta de las Flores in Dallas this weekend, but she invited me to dinner a week from tomorrow. She said she’d tell me where all the bodies are buried. Figuratively speaking, of course.”
“Hilary,” Mark added, “we’ve been invited, too—Lucia promises tamales. And Jenny, if you’d like to come….”
“Depends on how badly the records are mucked up. I’ll ring her later on this week.”
“See you Monday, Hilary. Good pizza, everyone.” Nathan fumbled at the doorknob, and Jenny leaped up and opened the door for him. She followed him out, saying, “I’ll unlock your car, shall I?”
“Bye.” Hilary eyed the back door after it shut, frowning slightly.
“All right,” Mark asked her. “What do you know that I don’t?”
“Wednesday I saw Nathan hugging and kissing Sharon Ward.”
“What? Geez, I was only joking about The Blue Angel.”
“I don’t know what to think, whether she’s after him and Nathan is gritting his teeth and thinking of Regensfeld, or if he really wants her.”
Mark was encouraged that Hilary could repeat some of the words he’d said to her during that awkward scene on her couch Tuesday night. Not that all of it had been awkward. “One kiss does not an affair make,” he reminded her.
“I know, I know.”
Sharon and Nathan could run their own lives. Mark stretched. He’d left his guitar by the fireplace this morning, and there it was still, leaning against the brick. He cradled the familiar shape in his arms, tried a quick trill or two, and settled back into his chair. Graymalkin looked inquisitively over the edge of the table. Hilary leaned her chin into her hand, her luminous eyes alert and characteristically uncritical. No doubt she remembered how Mark had once called his guitar his pacifier. Well, she had her knitting.
Despite her innocence her eyes could be shrewd. But then, in many ways she was innocent simply because she chose to be, like an Elizabethan lady ignoring the sewage-strewn streets. Tuesday night Mark had lain awake, pacing ruts in his own mind, resolving not to try again until Hilary was certain she could go through with it. But she wouldn’t know whether she was certain until she was actually trying…. Sex wasn’t like death or taxes, after all, although he could see resemblances.
He tested the strings, played a few bars of “Greensleeves”, then moved into “The Loch Tay Boat Song”, and its chorus, “For my heart’s a boat in tow”. Graymalkin clambered into Hilary’s lap, kneaded her jeans—Hilary grimaced and detached a claw—and burrowed into her lap. Mark was jealous.
And what if he offered her some kind of commitment? Would that calm her fears? Maybe, but it might exacerbate his own. If she’d been burned by Ben’s casual brutality, Mark had been burned by guilt. After his divorce it had been three years before he’d been able to touch another woman. He was committed to Hilary, more or less, for the moment anyway, so why go around bleating about it?
He strummed a few emphatic chords. Jenny walked in the door and smiled at the guitar. Little did she realize she was a chaperone, that Osborne was neutral ground, no-man’s land, whatever. Mark settled into “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, thinking of only the ordered notes spilling from his hands.
He came out of his reverie to hear Jenny and Hilary talking quietly. “….South Cadbury,” Jenny was saying. “I was just an undergraduate, quite naive, and was mortified at the end of the term when they voted me ‘Miss Undercut Balk’.”
Mark swallowed his guffaw—Jenny was always making him do that, darn her—but Hilary didn’t get it.
“A balk is the side of the trench, right?” Jenny explained. “Should be exactly vertical. In an undercut balk the top extends out farther than the bottom—it’s top-heavy.”
Realization dawned, and Hilary hid her blush by bending over the cat. Jenny quirked an eyebrow at Mark’s grin, no longer mortified. He seized the first topic that came to mind. “The cat looks a hundred per cent better. I guess we’ll have to call you Florence Catingale.”
“She’s very affectionate. Good company in the evenings, when it’s dark and quiet and I can hear that damnable clock ticking away like in Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’.”
“Why do you keep winding it, then, if it bothers you?”
Jenny’s expression froze, as though she were reeling in her tongue. “Dolores—the workmen—I don’t wind it, actually.”
; Oh? Mark thought. Osborne has little clock-winding elves?
“I guess if you hear things going bump in the night you can always blame them on her.” Hilary smoothed Graymalkin’s fur.
“Unless she’s with me at the time,” Jenny replied. “But she’s a good sentry—last night she woke me, and I thought I heard someone walking around outside. But when I put on the light, no one was there.”
“A prowler?” Hilary asked
Mark added, “You sure you’re all right here by yourself?”
Jenny was taking on her defiant Wellington look. “I probably heard an animal trying to get at the dustbin. Of course I’m all right. All those stories about a resident ghost are just that—stories.”
Mark began picking out an exercise. Hilary should rent out those guileless brown eyes of hers not as lie detectors but as truth attractors—her sober sweetness invited confidences.
“Kenneth was trying to make me leap into his arms,” Jenny continued. “He went on and on about a specter in Victorian dress floating down the front stairway. Me, I’ve seen sod-all. There’s nothing here but old furniture and someone else’s memories.” She stood up, walked over to the chair where Nathan’s box had been sitting, and picked something up.
Mark looked at Hilary. She leaned across the table to whisper, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” Mark nodded, thinking, Yeah, that makes all of us, and began the exercise again.
“I knew I should’ve put this in the parcel. He’s left without it.” Jenny laid a glossy silver and blue portfolio on the table, its cover displaying a photograph of the 1989 Dallas Cowboys football team.
“What’s in it?” Hilary asked.
“Old photos and newspaper cuttings.” Jenny opened the folder, and the contents spilled across the tabletop, exuding a breath of mildew.
Mark set down his guitar. “Look, here’s an old manila folder torn almost in half—no wonder someone replaced it with a new one.”
“Labeled in Arthur’s handwriting,” said Jenny. “Whitechapel murders.”
Hilary sifted through the pile of papers, sorting old photographs mounted on thick cardboard from fragile yellowed newspapers. Printed forms filled out in faded handwriting lay next to a letter written in a forceful scrawl. Ink smears and blots were scattered like bomb craters across the page.
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