“I’ve been married. I’m no favor.”
“Not all the time, no. But then, neither am I.” Hilary ruffled the short ends of his hair, sat down, and dumped jelly onto her toast. “I’d like to get married. I’d like to be Mrs. Owen. I just want to make sure we do it for the right reasons.”
“Oh God, yes, let’s make sure we do it for the right reasons.”
His gray eyes were polished windows. She could see the dearly won certainty inside him, and she could see her own dearly won trust reflected. “Maybe a small ceremony in Lucia’s garden,” she hazarded.
Mark captured her hand among the jelly jars, kissed it, and looked down at his plate with a choked comment about second chances.
Hilary bit her tongue to keep it from wagging on and on about how she could wear the rose-pink dress she’d worn to the wedding last summer, and how much of the year did Mark have to spend in Austin, and how she had a trust fund that would mature when she was twenty-five, about which she had ambiguous feelings. As far as Mark was concerned, the subject was settled, and the day’s work was at hand. That this day’s work might obviate the subject entirely was not something either of them would acknowledge.
Quickly, as though haste could force a conclusion, they ate and tidied up and discovered the morning lying heavily on Osborne House. Strands of high cloud streaked a bleary sky, and the air seemed to ooze like oil. The usual human figures orbited the house—first the thin belt of reporters sipping from paper cups of coffee, then the ring of police, then the satellites of students, Preston, and Jenny. Graymalkin lay on the back porch, eyes slitted, on the alert for mockingbird dive-bombers.
But today the students had different faces. They were all young and dressed casually, but their alert and wary poses hardly resembled the nonchalance of the real kids. Jenny was panting from trench to trench, trying to find them something to do which would look good but that wouldn’t damage anything. Faint ripples of static emanated from two boom boxes that Hilary assumed were plainclothes police radios.
Leslie Underwood was among the students. “I asked for the day off,” she explained. “Since I let the artifacts get away from me at the Lloyd, I thought maybe I could make up for it here.”
“They got away from me too,” Hilary told her.
Preston’s partly sympathetic, partly exasperated expression indicated that he’d already tried to convince Leslie her guilt trip was unwarranted.
Zapata’s hair was woven into a thick, smooth plait that fell from the crown of her head to her shoulders. If worst came to worst, Hilary reflected, she could use it as a bullwhip. The detective was wearing a tattered pair of jeans probably dating back to her college days. That they were just a bit snug was not going unnoticed by the male members of the crew. Her T-shirt sported the logo of the Hard Rock Cafe.
Yeager’s shirt bore a Greenpeace exhortation. “Attic room looks untouched,” he murmured to Mark and Hilary under the guise of showing them a handful of pebbles. “Fortunately it’s pretty dark in that closet—you can’t see where I mended the wallpaper.”
They pretended the pebbles were fascinating. “And if no one shows up tonight?” Mark asked.
“Then we haul those bags down to the lab and break out the microscopes. We can get fingerprints off almost anything.”
The sweat was already dripping down Hilary’s back. “But it’s more conclusive to draw the killer out, right?”
“More dramatic, too,” Yeager said with a meaningful glance at Zapata.
Setting his jaw, Mark stepped down into the garage pit. Jenny arrived at the opposite side, her spine set in full Wellington at Waterloo rigidity, the Union Jack on her T-shirt rippling as she breathed. If she smiled, she’d have broken her face. She didn’t smile. “Good morning. I trust you passed a pleasant night.”
“Ah—very nice, thank you,” Mark said, suppressing a smile.
Jenny, Hilary thought, was operating on automatic pilot. Without noticing her gaffe, the archaeologist pulled out a trowel and started scraping at an otherwise undistinguished patch of ground.
Preston handed Hilary the drawing board. Her pencil moved by itself, producing a sketch of Osborne, its horizontal lines too heavy for the vertical, dangerously imbalanced. She rolled down that paper, tore it off, wadded it up, and began sketching the Regensfeld artifacts: a church doorway constructed itself beneath her pencil, the disciples of Christ gathered for a last meal, an obscure saint donated a body part to a silver-gilt reliquary.
The police team blandly sifted dirt. The reporters took pictures of each other. If any silver Cadillacs cruised by, no one noticed.
Just before noon, Jenny and Zapata retired to the house. They emerged looking sober. “The deed is done,” said Jenny. “I told Bradshaw I found the Cross in Arthur’s study. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll make a recce at Harris Hospital.” She strode off toward the garage.
“She’s going to see Vasarian?” Mark asked Zapata.
“Said something had occurred to her but wouldn’t say what,” the disgruntled detective replied. “Y’all take a break too.”
One of the play-acting students went out for food. The rest wandered oh-so-casually around the house. Mark and Hilary drove to a nearby Chinese restaurant, ate a meal more out of habit than hunger, and managed to drag out their break by browsing in a bookstore. It was almost two when they returned to Osborne. “The wind’s backing around,” Mark commented as they climbed out of the van.
The upper leaves of the oak trees rippled, stilled, and rippled again. The northwest was darkening with cloud. Hilary felt a breath or two of cooler air stir the sticky atmosphere, but still she was hot. She wasn’t sure whether she heard distant thunder or distant aircraft.
“Is Jenny back?” Mark asked Zapata.
With the toe of her sneaker, Zapata erased the tic-tac-toe game she and Yeager had scratched in the dirt at the bottom of the garage pit. “Yes. About twenty minutes ago. Didn’t say a word, just went inside.”
Mark charged off toward the house, Hilary at his heels. No one could’ve gotten in there in broad daylight, she wanted to protest, but didn’t. For all she knew Dolores had supernatural abilities. If she could picture Zapata as an Aztec priestess, she could imagine Dolores as the Irish warrior-goddess Morrigan, garlanded with the heads of her enemies.
Graymalkin, scratching at the back door, looked up with a piteous meow. Mark knocked. No answer. “Jenny?” Still no answer. He opened the door and walked inside, Graymalkin dodging between his legs and into the bedroom. The kitchen was empty. The icebox barrier had been moved. “Jenny!” Mark bellowed, then ran toward the door that stood open to the front of the house.
Hilary’s cheeks were burning, her heart thumping so hard she was surprised it didn’t come through her ribs. MSG reaction, no doubt.
They almost trampled Jenny as she emerged from the cellar stairs. Her face was stark white, her hair almost standing on end, but her words were measured and icy calm. “Do you know the story of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary?”
“What?” Mark asked.
Jenny wasn’t looking at them but through them, her eyes dark tidal pools in which strange creatures swam. “Elizabeth’s husband threatened to turf her out if he caught her taking food to the poor. But she loaded her apron with bread anyway. He caught her. He asked, ‘What’s in your apron?’ She answered, ‘Roses.’ He demanded that she show him. When she opened her apron, nothing was there but roses.” Jenny turned back to the stairs. “I really have found the Cross.”
“What?” Hilary lunged forward. All three of them came close to cartwheeling down the steps.
The stone floor of the cellar was impacted with dirt, the stone walls were seamed by ribbons of concrete, and the air was so cold and dank that Hilary broke into goose flesh. High barred windows would have opened beneath the veranda if they hadn’t been glued shut by dirt. One room held cobwebbed wine racks, another an ancient furnace and water heater that would’ve been at home in Frankenstein’s lab. A third was empty except for a st
ained wooden workbench, a vise clutching one end and a vacant tool rack the other. The center of the workshop was lit by a bare hanging bulb, but the corners were dark. Hilary hoped nothing lurked there but the odd spider.
Jenny moved toward the darkest corner. “You said the other day that the clay soil in this area makes any foundation a dicey proposition at best. Arthur’s memoirs went on and on about Osborne being built on a foundation of shifting sand. In his letter to Vasarian offering to sell the Cross, Arthur said Jesus told Peter to build His church upon gravel.”
“Not upon a rock, like it says in the Bible?” Hilary asked.
“No. And then Arthur said he hoped to ‘cement a relationship’ between himself and the collector to whom he was offering the Cross.”
“Sand, gravel, and cement,” said Mark, “make concrete.”
Concrete chips lay in the corner, freshly gouged from a foot-wide fissure that extended from a window down to the floor. A rusty reinforcing rod, a handy probe, extended from the hole. Jenny jerked it away and threw it down with a crash. “I looked in this room when I first arrived. I searched the worktable and tapped on the walls and the floor. But then, that hidden door in the attic was buggered about so it wouldn’t sound hollow.” With her trowel she levered out another shower of chips. Gray dust swirled. Mark and Hilary bumped heads trying to look. “Vasarian was right. Arthur couldn’t have hidden the Cross forty years ago in the excavation area if he was offering it for sale in 1988.”
Inside the hole was a rounded cavity that Hilary suspected was an extension of Graymalkin’s drain pipe. Inside that was a wooden box, the twin of the one that held the ivory Jesus. “When Arthur gave my mother the figure,” Jenny explained, “it was already in its box, wrapped in muslin. All I did was substitute polyurethane. I wouldn’t be surprised if Arthur made the boxes either in this workshop or the other. He was quite a craftsman, along with everything else.” The acid in her voice could’ve dissolved stone. Mere concrete crumbled at her touch.
An odor of damp earth emanated from the cavity. “The rat,” said Hilary, “was a field rat, but it was foraging beneath the veranda.”
“Sod the rat.” With a heave and a scrape, Jenny pulled the box from the hole. Mark leaped forward to help her steady it.
Sure enough, a couple of the wooden slats were loose, spilling bits of cloth and what Hilary knew even in the dim corner to be ivory crumbs. She would have been glad to tear off the lid with her bare hands, but Jenny pried it off with the trowel. Hilary scooped aside the muslin shreds and was glad to see several pouches of moisture-absorbing silica gel.
The ancient ivory seemed to glow, driving back Osborne’s accumulated shadows. Carved figures moved in procession up the Cross, along its arms, and down again, acting out the life of Christ. From a tiny angel proclaiming divine purpose to a kneeling Mary, to the peremptory gesture of an armored Pilate, it was all there, even the almost microscopic “SPQR” carved on Pilate’s breastplate that Hilary could see only by squinting fiercely.
“This is it. This is really it.” She wrapped her fingers with a bit of the cloth and inspected the edges of the sculpture. There, on the square base, were the marks of rodent teeth. A bit of inscription might be gone—the light was too poor for her to see—but the damage was minimal. The rounded peaks and rims of the carved ivory kissed her fingertips. “It’s all right,” she announced with a triumphant grin. “The Word made flesh. Made concrete, if you will. You solve a mean puzzle, Jenny.”
Mark, too, was grinning. Another point to us, he was no doubt thinking. Another debit for the house.
Jenny reattached the lid, using the handle of her trowel as a hammer, and turned toward the stairway so abruptly that Hilary suspected she was hiding a genuine facial expression.
From upstairs Zapata’s voice called, “Where are you?” When they pounded up the stairs and displayed their prize, she exclaimed “I’ll be damned!” and herded them into the kitchen. Jenny laid the box on the table while Zapata shouted out the back door.
“How is Vasarian?” Hilary at last thought to ask.
“Recovering very quickly,” Jenny replied. “Quite his usual self. Whatever role he plays—courtier, spy, crusader—he plays it well. I wonder if he knows who he really is.”
Mark quirked a brow. “Do any of us?”
Zapata, unconcerned with philosophical questions, demanded to know how Jenny had found the Cross.
“From Arthur’s notes,” she explained, her hand resting protectively on the wooden box. “And from the letter that Vasarian saw—he remembered the exact words, fortunately. I had another question for him….”
Yeager opened the back door and ushered Leslie inside. Zapata organized them into an expedition to take the Cross to join the figure downtown—just because she was using it as bait didn’t mean she actually wanted it on the premises. Hilary reassured herself that both artifacts would return to the museum soon enough. Her palms itched, wanting to re-unite them.
Jenny grudgingly reopened the wooden crate. Mark found a sturdy corrugated cardboard box in a cabinet and dumped out a cockroach. Hilary transferred the Cross and its wrappings, although not before Yeager and Zapata took long looks. Leslie picked up the cardboard box somewhat more cautiously than she would nitroglycerin. “Okay,” she said to Yeager. “Let’s go.” The door shut, leaving the room as silent and empty as the wooden box.
Jenny sighed. “I had another question for Vasarian. How did he know that he was attacked by a woman when he had torchlight in his eyes?”
“From her shape?” guessed Zapata.
“Yes and no. What he saw was the shape of the garments. The person who attacked him was wearing the costume from the attic.”
“Sharon was wearing a similar outfit at the charity ball the night Nathan was killed,” offered Hilary. “Not in white though, but a sort of pink-and-cream flowered pattern.”
“What’s your point?” Zapata asked Jenny.
Jenny leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms, her pose that of a flying buttress supporting a heavy wall. “His notes indicate that Arthur was, as we’ve guessed, rather too interested in Jack the Ripper. He believed he was the Ripper’s son.”
“He had his father’s murder of his mother for evidence,” said Mark, with a grimace toward the front of the house.
“Exactly. Not that his ramblings on the subject are that precise, but one passage did strike me. The possibility that Jack was never caught because he either dressed in woman’s clothing or was a woman himself.”
“You mean Arthur himself might have been playing the female ghost?” The chilled sweat on Hilary’s back became beads of ice.
Zapata’s brows were almost shaking hands. “He might not have intended it to be the ghost of his mother. Perhaps he was simply portraying a generic Ripper victim.”
“But Arthur’s playing his own ghost now,” Mark pointed out.
“So is it Sharon?” asked Hilary. “Dolores? If Arthur could climb into long skirts, why not Kenneth? I can’t see Travis doing it, but then, he’s only related by marriage. So is Dolores, if you want to be technical. But she’s related through her children.”
“Dolores’s children,” Jenny went on. “Do you remember Vasarian saying someone had searched his room? How someone has known all along who I am? Last night I had a perfectly appalling thought. If Kenneth was the burglar, he was trying to seduce me whilst knowing full well I’m his sister.”
Hilary looked at her dirty sneakers, turned slightly pigeon-toed. She saw Kenneth’s amiable if vacuous grin, at such odds with his dark and distant eyes. Her mind hiccupped. “Not only that. I bet Kenneth’s costume was meant to be Roman. One of two specific Romans. Julius Caesar and Marc Antony were both lovers of Cleopatra—who Dolores was playing at the ball.”
“Oh yes,” Jenny said slowly. “We’ve all seen how Kenneth competes with both Sharon and Vasarian for Dolores’s attention.”
“There’s no love lost between Kenneth and Travis,” Mark added. “Ke
nneth could’ve tried to frame Travis by begging, borrowing, or stealing his car, driving over to Moss Street and hotwiring Gilbert’s car—not to mention later on cutting its brake line. He might even have left the bone on purpose. Arthur worked on cars. Why not Kenneth?”
“Tidy,” Zapata murmured. “Very tidy. Kenneth might have killed Nathan to help Dolores with the artifact scam. We already knew we had someone very clever on our hands.”
“Kenneth was here yesterday tearing up the house looking for the Cross,” Mark went on. “The bait should work on him, too.”
Hilary shook her head. “Here’s another appalling thought for you. Vasarian never overheard the Coburgs say anything significant about the case. Maybe that was because they suspected him. Maybe it was because they haven’t been working together at all.”
“Hell!” said Zapata. “Bradshaw tells Dolores, but Kenneth doesn’t get the word, and we’re back to sifting fingerprints to find the murderer.”
“I think we shall simply have to sit by the water hole and see who comes to drink.” Jenny slapped the cabinet so hard, Hilary was surprised it didn’t crumble beneath her hand. “I have to accomplish something this afternoon. Mark, come help me record the post holes in the last trench.”
“Right.” Mark’s smile died stillborn. Zapata slammed out the door, muttering something beneath her breath that Hilary felt sure was an incantation conjuring a psychopath red-handedly waving a knife. The Cross was only part of the bait. She, Mark, and Jenny were the rest.
Outside the hot, humid breeze had died, leaving the air suffocatingly still except for an occasional burst of cool air. Thunderheads packed the horizon; by the time Yeager and Leslie returned, the gray and white billows filled half the sky, and a cool wind was blowing steadily from the northwest.
Whether Jenny accomplished anything that afternoon Hilary couldn’t say; she and Mark might as well have been doing brain surgery, so serious were their faces. Mark glanced around at Hilary every now and then, as though to reassure himself she was still there. She smiled at him and played her memories of last night over and over again until they became a soothing drone beneath the shrill piping of her nerves.
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