So that’s it, Hilary told herself. Now that, at last, works.
“You sod,” Jenny repeated, but this time with her own whisky-dry humor. “That’s why you were at Osborne last night. You never believed me when I said I didn’t have the Cross. But then—why should you have trusted me any more than I trusted you?”
Vasarian grimaced apologetically. Wiping his eyes, Mark peeled himself away from the door. Zapata’s eyes uncrossed and she gulped down something about the size of a carp. She shouldered her way forward, trying to regain control of the situation. “Good God, you could at least have come to the police!”
“My dear woman, I am the police. Until Nathan was killed, it was a matter of art forgery, not homicide. After his death I felt that my work was better conducted undercover.”
“And just what have you discovered undercover?”
“Yes, well, there’s the rub.” Vasarian either sighed or gasped for breath. “I’ve decided that the robber who broke into my hotel room when I first arrived was less interested in the trifling amount of money he stole than in the contents of my attaché case. Inside were the papers pertaining to the Eleanor Cross, the Allied Art Commission, and Pamela Galliard.” Jenny stepped back cautiously. “Yes, I’m afraid someone, I presume the killer, has known since your arrival who you are. Of course, at the time I wasn’t sure it mattered—for all I knew Dolores and Pamela had been corresponding for years.”
“I bet that same someone hoped Jenny would be arrested for Nathan’s death,” Mark said. “The killer had no way of knowing I was there with Jenny that night, that she had an alibi.”
He stated that as flatly as he’d state name, rank, and serial number, Hilary noted. Well, why not—that wound had bled itself dry.
“It’s quite possible,” Zapata said. “That could well be why the killer either put the Jesus figure in Nathan’s pocket or didn’t bother to remove it. You didn’t have your Interpol warrant in your attaché case?”
“No, fortunately. Whichever Coburg is a closet psychopath seems to have had enough doubts about my motivations to let me go until last night—whilst taking the precaution of not divulging anything significant in my presence. Perhaps the attack on me was your fault, Detective. You should be relieved to know you’re pressing the culprit so closely.”
Zapata’s brows telegraphed skepticism.
“Nathan knew about you, didn’t he?” Hilary asked Vasarian.
“Yes, he did. You’ll understand I could hardly confide in Bradshaw—he is dear Dolly’s creature. But Nathan had a rare facility for seeing the substance beyond the style. I warned him there might be a substitution. When there was, he told me straightaway. He was killed that very night. How the Coburgs found out he knew, I’ve never decided—it might have something to do with his—his indiscretion with Sharon.” Vasarian closed his eyes, summoning his strength, then looked up again, His audience was hanging on every word. “Nathan said he was going to Osborne that night to look for the Cross. I went to the museum, confirmed that the artifacts had indeed been switched, and continued on to the costume ball. I needed not only to prove the Coburgs were forgers, mind you, but now to find the real artifacts.”
“You had us believing you were not only the forger but the murderer,” said Mark.
“I assure you that murder was not in my plans. Once Nathan was dead, however, I felt at fault and deemed it imperative to continue my masquerade so as to uncover his killer.”
“Thanks,” said Hilary in a slightly choked voice.
“I do apologize, Miss Chase. I wasn’t sure whether you had recognized the forgeries as such, and I didn’t dare take any one else into my confidence.”
Hilary waved away his apologies. “No problem.” She saw again the photos from the costume ball. Vasarian’s crusader costume suddenly made perfect sense.
“Your mask is off now,” Zapata stated. “The killer was waiting for you at Osborne last night.”
“I think,” replied Vasarian, “the killer spends a lot of time at Osborne. I merely had the misfortune to blunder into the spider’s web.”
Hilary visualized Mark, Jenny, and herself sitting around the kitchen table sharing tea and sympathy while a malignant shape listened outside the door. She bit her lip—too late now to retract admissions both personal and professional. Perhaps Travis, overhearing her history, had known altogether too well how his attack would frighten her.
“Do you know anything about the attempt on Mark’s and Hilary’s lives?” Zapata asked Vasarian.
“No, I don’t. I had just about decided that Hilary had, indeed, recognized the fakes, when Jenny found the skeleton in the excavation. That, I thought, explained the murder attempt, so I said nothing.” Vasarian’s face was growing gray and his monitors were inching toward overload. Hilary figured that Zapata would rip out her own heart and hand it over if it would get Vasarian’s story out any more quickly.
“Speaking out about the skeleton,” said Jenny, and went on to tell about the equipment in the ruins of the garage, and the rings on the bony hand.
“We haven’t identified the man, yet,” added Zapata, “but we’re working on it.”
“Very good,” Vasarian murmured. “We’re closing in on our quarry.”
“As he—she—closes in on you,” said Mark.
Vasarian sank into his pillow, closing those dark eyes burned by perception. “I met Arthur once, at a reception in Firenze. Florence. He seemed to me then to be a man pursued by demons. After living with his house, his relics, and his family for several weeks, I realize just how many and varied were the demons after him. Whatever crimes he committed, I pity him.”
Jenny turned away, pretending great interest in an oscilloscope. Hilary looked down at her feet, Mark up at the ceiling. Zapata inhaled, presumably to ask more questions, when a nurse bustled into the room. “All right, you need to leave him alone now.”
Deftly she moved them down the hall to a waiting room. Zapata dived toward a public phone, threw her quarter into it, and dialed. “Maria? Rosalind. I need an identity check. Vasarian, Nicholas. Yes, another one. This time call Interpol, see if he works for them. Yeah, I’ll hold.” She tucked the receiver between her head and her shoulder and folded her arms. “It was either Dolores or Sharon who stabbed him.”
“I doubt if it was Sharon,” said Hilary. “Vasarian’s right—Nathan could see the substance beyond the style. I can’t see him having an affair with a psychopath.”
“Maybe he had some idea of reforming her,” Mark offered.
“So it’s the bitch-goddess herself?” Jenny asked. “Unless you want to postulate Sharon as a teenage psychopath, it would have to be Dolores who killed Felicia and the workman.”
“Unless it was Arthur,” said Mark quietly.
Jenny’s features contracted, but she didn’t turn away. “Unless it was Arthur. He was right-handed, I believe.”
“They’re all right-handed.” Zapata shifted the telephone receiver from one side to the other. “Surely it’s occurred to you that we could be dealing with several killers. Arthur or Dolores in 1975. Dolores, Sharon, or Kenneth for Nathan. Any one of them making the attempts on you and Vasarian.”
Hilary felt slightly sick. She walked over to the window and looked out toward the glittering skyscrapers of the city, reflecting the blue of the sky. The April sun seemed too fresh and clean to shine on demons. But then, demons lurked in the dark fortresses of the heart.
“Come on, come on,” said Zapata under her breath. “We got phones. We got faxes. We got teletypes….” She straightened abruptly. “Yeah, Maria. He is? Fraud Squad? Okay. Muchas gracias.”
She hung up the receiver and offered the others as sheepish a grin as Hilary had ever seen on her face. “He’s who he says he is, all right. I blew that one, didn’t I?”
“Like you said,” Hilary assured her, “you don’t know what’s evidence and what isn’t.”
Not especially mollified, Zapata led the way downstairs. Outside, the air was rent by the
wail of a siren, and an ambulance skidded toward the Emergency Room. Its escorting police car stopped at the curb, and the driver leaned out the window. “Hey, Rosalind! Convenience store robbery. Two down—the perp had a Magnum, the store owner a shotgun. Come on over, cut out the middleman.”
With a weary shrug, Zapata climbed into the patrol car.
Jenny’s shoulders seemed too tense to shrug. “See you back at Osborne,” she said, and trudged toward the parking lot.
At Osborne Mark and Hilary found a convention of newspeople watching Preston and several students gingerly remove the bones and the burned equipment and pile it into boxes. One particularly enterprising reporter approached Jenny when she drove up, calling, “Eh, luv, I’m from the London Sunburn, you don’t want to aid and abet these Yanks, do you?”
Ignoring him just as efficiently as the others, Jenny drove on up the driveway but couldn’t get her Blazer into the garage; it was blocked by a BMW, a Lexus, a Cadillac, and three work vans. A carpenter, Hilary noted, a bricklayer, and a plumber. No partridges in pear trees. “A gathering of Coburgs,” she muttered as she and Mark walked toward the dig. “A pride of Coburgs. A gaggle of Coburgs.”
“A counterfeit of Coburgs?” suggested Mark.
Preston looked up, and with the parallel arm-wavings of an airport traffic controller, turned them toward the back porch, where Lucia Hernandez sat dangling a string for Graymalkin. “I have news for you,” she called.
Jenny came around the corner of the house in time to join them on the porch. Graymalkin looked expectantly for the string, saw that Lucia wasn’t playing any more, and stalked off, disgruntled.
“My cousin in Mexico City’s found a name for your skeleton,” Lucia announced. “One of the men who left Osborne the night of the fire is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in Guanajuato. The other, Juan Esparza, vanished.”
“Did Esparza have any identifying marks?” Jenny asked. “That would show up on his bones, of course.”
Lucia reached into her purse and produced an old envelope with a list scrawled on the back. “All right. He was left-handed.”
“So far so good,” said Mark.
“He had a gold filling in his upper left molar.”
“I drew that in,” Hilary said.
“And he broke his right forearm as a child.”
“Check,” concluded Jenny. “You can see the healed fracture.”
Beaming, Lucia tucked her list away. “He was a metalworker from Taxco, one of the best. His wife says he came here to Fort Worth three different times, each time with fake immigration papers made out by his patron. Who Juan always called Don Arturo.”
“That ties it up.” Jenny sighed and looked accusingly up at the house.
“Oh, that’s not all.” Lucia rocked back on her heels, enjoying her audience every bit as much as Vasarian had enjoyed his. “I tracked down the housekeeper of the family in Highland Park, in Dallas, where Dolores and the children spent the night of the fire in 1975. The night Felicia died.”
“Yes?” said Mark and Hilary at once.
“Early that evening Dolores left the children and went shopping. She was gone most of the evening, came home well after the stores had closed saying she’d met a friend and gone out for a drink. The interesting thing is, she got a phone call right before she left.”
“It’s not quite an hour’s drive back over here. She could’ve killed both Esparza and Felicia, then gone back,” said Mark.
“But that would argue premeditation,” Jenny pointed out. “It’s possible Arthur and Dolores lured Felicia here, but why?”
Hilary felt like a typist whose fingers had started on the wrong row on her keyboard, typing busily away at what she thought were coherent sentences but producing only gibberish. “If we could figure out all the interlocking motives, then maybe we could name the murderer.”
“I love it when a plan comes together,” Mark said sarcastically.
Jenny exclaimed, “Look!” The drapes twitched inside the window of the music room. “All the suspects are here. Who was watching us?”
“I think I’ll go home now.” Lucia tucked her handbag beneath her arm like a football and hurried toward the driveway. Jenny spun on her heel and started toward the veranda and the front door.
Mark looked at Hilary. His eyes were like searchlights, she thought, so bright they could cut through the darkest shadows. “Let’s go,” she said.
Jenny was just bounding up the steps when a surge of people came out the front door. For one confused moment Hilary visualized the running of the bulls at Pamplona, small human figures scurrying frantically before the lumbering shapes of the animals. Jenny flattened herself against the veranda railing. Mark pulled Hilary off the sidewalk and onto the grass.
There were only four workmen, she realized, attired in grubby overalls, jeans, and Tshirts, and clutching boxes of tools. Hammers, chisels, and saws jangled accompaniment to the scuffle of boots and the starting of engines. The vans dodged around the reporters and their shepherding police and disappeared down York Boulevard.
Dolores stood in the doorway, her expression that of a Hatfield welcoming a McCoy. “What do you want?”
“I work here,” Jenny replied.
From inside the house, Sharon’s voice whined, “Mother, he had them tear up the clock!”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Dolores over her shoulder. “It wasn’t mine.”
“That’s just the point,” Kenneth’s voice said. “That clock’s been here for years and years.” He appeared beside Dolores and draped an arm around her shoulders. “Dr. Galliard. What can we do for you? Polish your trowels? Butter your crumpets?”
Jenny gave him a smile in which her eyeteeth were the most prominent feature.
Sharon’s pale face appeared behind Kenneth. Dolores laughed. “We have the Foundation banquet tonight. I suggest we control our animosities for the occasion.”
Kenneth smiled and adjusted his tie. Sharon pouted. Dolores settled her sweater over her shoulders, hoisted her handbag, and walked across the veranda and down the steps like a movie star crossing a soundstage. Travis, the last out, shut and pointedly locked the door. He avoided Hilary’s offended look, not to mention Mark’s hostile glare. As the procession swept down the walk, Jenny offered their backs a two-finger salute, the British translation of the well-known American gesture. Hilary choked. Mark grinned.
Dolores said to Kenneth, “Let me call the workmen next time, dear. There’s no need to vandalize the place.”
“But, but….” Kenneth darted a glance over his shoulder. Jenny dropped her hand to her side and looked blandly back.
“We can wait,” Dolores told him. She climbed into her car, sent Jenny, Mark, and Hilary a pleasant wave, and almost mowed down several people with minicams.
Kenneth slammed his car door and followed. Travis and Sharon sat for a moment in close consultation, shooting more than one searching look at the trio by the front steps, then moved off in only a slightly less aggressive manner.
“Mr. Vasarian is doing very nicely, thank you,” Hilary called after them.
“That purse of hers is just about big enough for a bowie knife,” Mark muttered.
“So they’re just going to sit back and let us find the Cross,” said Jenny. She took the veranda steps in two leaps and, pulling out her own set of keys, opened the front door. Hilary wasn’t sure just how she and Mark got up the steps, but when Jenny stepped inside the house, they were right behind her, shoulder to shoulder, hands joined.
The stampede of police and paramedics last night had kicked the parts of the clock into a corner. The parlor fireplace was full of sooty brick. Boards had been pried from the stairwell. “Kenneth,” Jenny said with a disapproving sigh.
“About as subtle as a skunk beneath the porch,” Mark said.
In the mingled sunlight and shadow at the top of the stairs, something moved. It wasn’t quite a noise, wasn’t quite a shape; it was suggestion, striking deeper into the mind than the simp
le input of ear or eye.
Jenny walked up three steps, her upturned face intent. Mark and Hilary shrank together at the foot of the stairs. She had no doubt he was feeling what she was feeling. Someone was standing in the upper hallway, looking down. And yet she could see nothing.
Arthur. The old man had been haunted, Vasarian had said. Now he was haunting. This was what Jenny meant when she said she sensed him. This was what was missing from the older, less immediate ghost of Vicky.
The presence shifted. It was like heat waves rising from a pavement. It was like the shimmer on the surface of a pool. It was a faint breeze on Hilary’s skin, drawing each individual hair erect. The air in the stairwell grew achingly cold, as though the apparition were drawing on the warmth of their bodies in its effort to materialize. Mark was trembling, Hilary realized. So was she.
A distant voice murmured, scratchy, like an ancient record. “Guinevere.” Yes, that was Jenny’s real name. “Guinevere….”
“I’m here,” Jenny said and took one more step.
The presence vanished. Not with a thunderclap or poof of smoke. The presence was simply there one minute and gone the next. Jenny sagged against the banister, swearing under her breath. He wants to talk to her, Hilary thought, but he can’t quite bring himself to confront her. Which is just about the way she feels about him.
“Hey,” Mark said, his voice stretched very thin, his hand crushing Hilary’s. “Jenny, don’t you think we should go see what kind of a mess the students are making of the dig?”
“Right.” Jenny drew herself up and led the way out of the house into the sunshine. Hilary’s backward glance showed her nothing but dust and devastation behind the closing door.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was almost noon, and the sun was warm. But Mark didn’t mind. Once again Osborne House had left him so chilled he could’ve personally iced down a tub of beer. He hoped Hilary hadn’t noticed that chill. If she had, she had enough class not to drip sympathy all over him. Her tucking him in during the night had been all right, but he’d had to keep himself from fully waking up, because then he’d have wanted to make love to her.
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