To the Rescue

by Jean Barrett

  “What if we can’t get in?”

  But he had already anticipated that potential problem. And solved it. He produced a key from the same pocket that had contained the map. “It’s a master key. Courtesy of Father Stephen. Let’s see if we need it.”

  They didn’t. When he tried the first door on their right, it opened without resistance.

  If they’re all like this, Jennifer thought, then maybe their occupants had nothing to hide. Or maybe in a place like this it would have looked odd if any one of them had locked his door. After all, this wasn’t a hotel.

  “This one should belong to Harry Ireland,” Leo said, leading the way into the room.

  For all Jennifer knew the salesman might be a master of organization where his work was concerned. His personal habits were another matter. Jennifer surveyed a room where articles of clothing were strewn across the bed and on the backs of chairs. The doors of a plain, sturdy wardrobe, the kind that once would have been found in the servants’ quarters of an Edwardian house, gaped open.

  “It’s a mess,” she said.

  “Yeah, and let’s leave it and the others exactly as we find them. We don’t want any of them guessing someone was snooping in their rooms. You take the wardrobe, and I’ll look through the suitcase there,” he said, indicating a piece of scuffed luggage which lay open on the foot of the bed.

  Jennifer approached the wardrobe with misgiving. She hated having to paw through someone’s personal belongings, knowing how much she would have resented an invasion of her own privacy. But since this undertaking was necessary…

  There was a faux leather case on the floor of the wardrobe. She lifted it out and raised the lid. It was the salesman’s sample case. The contents consisted of various catalogs accompanied by order blanks, a selection of over-the-counter type drugs, condiments and what looked like packages of organically grown dried fruits and vegetables. It was an odd assortment, but there was nothing harmful or particularly unusual.

  “Find anything interesting?” Leo called from the bed.

  “Not so far.”

  She spent another couple of minutes carefully checking the case while making certain she replaced each item exactly where it belonged. Satisfied, she put the case back in the wardrobe and turned her attention to the garments inside hanging carelessly on pegs. A search of their pockets rewarded her with nothing but an old ticket stub.

  “I’m not having any luck at all over here,” she reported. “How about you?”

  Leo didn’t answer her. Puzzled by his silence, she backed out of the wardrobe. He was still there at the foot of the bed, holding a packet of letters he must have removed from the suitcase. His head was bent over one of those letters.

  “Leo?”

  She got a response this time in the form of a long, low whistle.

  “What is it?”

  “Hot stuff. Come over here and see.”

  She joined him at the bed. He handed her the letter. Jennifer could feel her face growing pink as she read it, and she wasn’t easily embarrassed. The writer, some woman the salesman was involved with, recounted in graphic detail their last meeting together and how she longed to get naked with him again at the first opportunity.

  “Sounds like old Harry is a real stallion, huh? And the other letters are even hotter.”

  “We shouldn’t be reading them.” Jennifer thrust the letter back into his hand. “They can’t have anything to do with what we’re investigating.”

  “Probably not. Except in one of them the lady writes about leaving her husband to run away with Harry. If only they had the money. A lot of it.”

  “That’s just talk. It’s nothing incriminating.”

  “Trying to tell me Harry Ireland has to be just what he says he is? The old-fashioned traveling salesman, down to and including…well, not the farmer’s daughter in this case but somebody’s wife he’s met on the road.” Leo shook his head. “Doesn’t satisfy me.”

  “Why?”

  “He isn’t right. Haven’t you noticed the way he talks? Like some British colonel out of an old movie.”

  “It’s just an affectation.”

  “Maybe. But it’s as much of a cliché as the image of a traveling salesman. Think I’ll be keeping my eye on Harry.”

  He reached for the letter’s envelope he had laid on top of the open suitcase. Jennifer wasn’t sure whether it was an accident or intentional when his hand brushed against the side of her breast. She was certain about her reaction. A tongue of fire streaked through her, setting off an alarm.

  Stepping away from him, she tried to be casual about it. “There’s nothing more to be seen in here, is there? Can we get on to the next room?”

  “Just give me a second. I want to make sure these letters are all in the same order I found them.”

  She was relieved when they left Harry Ireland’s room and moved on to his neighbor. The door here was also unlocked.

  “Map says this one belongs to Fiona and Alfred Brasher,” Leo said, again leading the way inside.

  The Brashers’ room proved to be as tidy as the salesman’s was messy. There was no sign anywhere of clutter.

  Leo leaned down, peeking beneath the bed. “Yep, they slid their suitcase under there. What do you want this time? The suitcase or the wardrobe?”

  “I’ll take the suitcase.”

  Dragging the single piece of luggage out into the open, she heaved it up on a chair and lifted the top. There was no disorder here either. All of the garments the suitcase contained were precisely folded.

  This was going to require extra care, Jennifer told herself as she began to search through the contents. She had to leave everything looking undisturbed.

  Leo had to be having the same problem. “Talk about a challenge,” he grumbled from the direction of the wardrobe. “I swear they must have measured the distance between the clothes they hung in here to make sure none of them touched each other. A real pair of neat freaks.”

  It was down near the bottom of the suitcase that Jennifer discovered the picture. She took it out for a closer examination.

  “No secrets in here,” Leo said, closing the doors of the wardrobe. “You find anything?”

  “Maybe. Come and have a look at this.”

  He joined her by the chair. “What have you got?”

  What Jennifer had was a photograph of a group of young men. The way they were dressed indicated a team posed for the camera at some kind of sports event.

  “I don’t see that it means anything,” Leo said.

  “Here.” Her finger pointed to one of the faces in the back row. It was the face of the young man who wanted to be a monk.

  Leo looked closely at the figure, seeing now what he had missed with his first glance. “Yeah, it’s Patrick all right.”

  “Why would the Brashers have a picture of Patrick?”

  “Guess we could speculate about that.”

  The husky way he said it, and the way he stood beside her, so close that she could feel the heat of his body, made her even more aware of the danger she had felt back in Harry Ireland’s room. There was a long moment of pure sexual suspense.

  Jennifer ended it with a brusque “Let’s not. We need to move on.”

  She quickly occupied herself with returning the photograph to the suitcase, making sure everything was left as she’d found it, then closing the suitcase and placing it back under the bed.

  “Proves one thing anyway,” Leo said. “The Brashers did know Patrick before they came here. But exactly what that connection is and how it relates to the argument we overheard outside the dining parlor is still a mystery. And maybe nothing to do with the mystery we’re trying to solve.”

  Or maybe it did, Jennifer thought, although she was unwilling to discuss it when she was anxious to leave the scene. And not just because they couldn’t afford to lose time. Leo was too much of a temptation. She promised herself that she was going to avoid getting too close to him in the two rooms they had yet to search.

 
The next room on the map was Roger and Sybil Harding’s, which was also unlocked. Unlike the first two rooms, this one had a long bench situated under the window. There were two suitcases sitting on it side by side. Jennifer presumed that one of them belonged to Sybil and the other was her husband’s. Both of them were open, their contents in plain sight. That could mean their owners had nothing to hide. Maybe.

  “Suitcases or wardrobe?” Leo asked.

  “I’ll start with the wardrobe.”

  Jennifer found it was a good choice. There were several interesting items in the massive cupboard.

  The first to catch her eye was the monk’s robe suspended from a peg in one corner. It was identical to the robes worn by all of the brothers at Warley. Had Roger Harding worn it when he was himself a member of the order? Clad himself in it whenever he returned to the monastery on his periodic retreats? Possibly, but on the two occasions she’d been with him, Roger had been dressed in ordinary clothes.

  Most of the other garments hanging in the wardrobe belonged to Sybil. They were stylish and looked expensive. So did the vanity case placed on the floor of the wardrobe. She removed it from the cupboard for a better look. It was crafted of fine leather. It also had an impressive family crest on its lid.

  It seemed Sybil Harding not only had money, she had rank. Unless, of course, the case was secondhand. Which it probably was, since Sybil was the kind of woman who would make certain you knew she had a title. And she hadn’t done that.

  Jennifer opened the vanity. It held the usual toilet articles, creams, lotions and every makeup imaginable. She poked through them. No, nothing else.

  She was replacing the case in the wardrobe when she found a bottle tucked behind a row of shoes. She took it out and held it up to the light. The bottle was half full.

  “One of them likes gin,” she said, waving the bottle in Leo’s direction. “A lot, if you go by the level.”

  Leo looked up from the suitcases he was examining. “Beats anything I’ve found over here. Unless you count the lady’s fancy underwear, which I don’t.”

  No, he wasn’t the sort of man to appreciate lingerie. Not without the right woman wearing it for him anyway.

  Jennifer returned the bottle to the wardrobe and closed the doors. Her search may have been interesting, but it had provided no useful clues. Leo was equally disappointed.

  “Nothing else in these bags but a pile of reading material,” he reported. “Dull stuff. Most of it religious. Guess that’s understandable, with old Roger coming here on regular retreat.”

  “It makes you wonder though, doesn’t it?” Jennifer said, moving close enough to Leo to talk about it but not close enough to risk any further intimacy.

  “What does?”

  “Just that with Roger Harding being as devout as he is, why did he ever leave the order?”

  “Easy. He married an attractive woman, didn’t he?”

  “Meaning?”

  “He couldn’t take the celibacy. There are monks and priests who can’t.”

  While that was true, it was perhaps unfair to judge Roger by so simple an explanation. After all, there were such things as crises of faith.

  Leo cast his gaze around the room. “Looks like there’s nothing else to see in here. You ready to tackle Patrick?”

  Jennifer was more than ready to move on to the last room. Their investigation had taken more time than she’d imagined it would. She was beginning to be very nervous about that. What if the memorial service had ended? That could mean the guests were even now leaving the chapel and on their way back here.

  But the corridor still lay in silent gloom when they reached Patrick’s door. Leo’s hand closed on the handle. And met resistance.

  “Locked?”

  “Yeah,” he said, digging the master key out of his pocket.

  “And none of the others were. Do you suppose that could mean…”

  “That our Patrick does have something to hide? Could be,” he said, using the key to admit them into the room.

  But the young man’s quarters turned out to be even more of a disappointment than the other three rooms. Patrick had brought very few belongings with him. Leo reported after looking through the wardrobe that it contained nothing but several changes of clothes and an extra pair of shoes.

  “What about you?” he asked Jennifer, who was going through the simple, solitary bag perched on the wide window ledge.

  “I’m not doing any better. A couple of books, that’s all. Religious, like Roger Harding’s material. But that’s no surprise if he’s thinking of joining the order.”

  “Guess the kid just likes his privacy,” he said, referring to the locked door. “You ready to call it quits?”

  Jennifer didn’t answer him. She had found something wrapped in a T-shirt at the bottom of the bag. Something that alarmed her.

  “What is it?” Leo asked, her silence telling him she had made a discovery. He swiftly crossed the room to her side.

  “This,” she said, holding out a wicked-looking knife for him to see.

  Leo took it by the handle, turning it in his hand. “It’s no penknife, is it? More like a weapon.”

  “An ugly one. Why would he bring something like that here, of all places?”

  “Who knows. Maybe the kid is paranoid about his safety. Maybe that’s why he locks his door.”

  And maybe Patrick had a particular need to protect himself, she thought, unable to forget the nasty quarrel they had overheard outside the dining parlor.

  “It wasn’t a knife that killed Guy and Brother Anthony, so we have no reason to take it with us,” Leo said, giving the knife back to her.

  Even though Jennifer would have preferred to confiscate the thing, she knew he was right. Removing it would tell Patrick that someone had been in his room. She wrapped it up again in the T-shirt and tucked it back in the bag.

  “This has all been worthless,” she said, piling the other contents of the bag on top of the knife, making certain she left them looking undisturbed. “There was nothing in any of the rooms to tell us who the killer might be or what happened to the Madonna.”

  “Did you think it would be that easy? It never is. But it wasn’t a wasted effort. If nothing else, it’s given us a better handle on our suspects. And that’s always worth something in an investigation.”

  Was it? She wasn’t convinced, although she wasn’t about to stop here and discuss it with him. All she wanted was to get away before they were discovered. But she ended up having to wait impatiently for Leo, who insisted on a last look around the room.

  Satisfied that they had overlooked nothing, he led the way out into the corridor. There was another moment’s delay while he searched for the master key.

  “Thought I stuck it in—no, here it is in the other pocket.”

  “Please hurry,” she urged him.

  “Relax,” he said, relocking the door and testing it to make sure it was secure. “We’re almost in the clear.”

  But almost wasn’t enough. The words were scarcely out of his mouth when Jennifer heard the sound of approaching foot steps. They came from back around the corner in the direction of the stairway. Her uneasiness had just been justified.

  “Someone’s coming,” she whispered.

  “I hear.”

  This was no time to panic, she told herself, looking in the opposite direction for an escape route. There was none. The corridor dead-ended in a blank wall less than ten yards away. They were trapped! Now was a good time to panic!

  “What are we going to do? Whoever it is is going to come around that corner in another second, and if he finds us here—”

  “This way,” Leo said, drawing her swiftly in the direction of the dead end.

  That was when she noticed it, realized what he intended. Daylight. That meant a window along this side of the corridor, and with the walls of the castle being as thick as they were…

  They reached the source of the light. It was better than just a window with a wide ledge that might
, or might not, have accommodated them. It was a floor-to-ceiling alcove deep enough to conceal them. Providing, of course, no one wandered to this end of the corridor.

  She and Leo backed into the alcove. The trouble was, it was a very narrow alcove with just enough space for them to fit. Jennifer found herself squeezed so tightly against Leo’s hard body that his warm breath mingled with hers.

  This couldn’t be good. Not that she had any choice about it since whoever was coming had already arrived. She could hear him passing the doors in the corridor. Then the footsteps stopped. There was the sound of a key scraping in a lock. Patrick. It had to be Patrick. His was the only door that needed to be unlocked.

  The door opened, closed behind him. There was silence now. Prepared to flee down the corridor, Jennifer started to steal away from the alcove. Leo pulled her back, his hand on her arm.

  “Wait,” he whispered in her ear. “He might be stopping in his room just long enough to get something.”

  The seconds passed. Tense seconds, and not just because she feared discovery. The intimacy of their situation, her awareness of Leo pressed against her side with all the heat of a lover’s embrace, had every nerve in her body on alert. It was all she could do not to squirm.

  “Careful,” he warned her softly.

  For a brief moment Jennifer thought he was cautioning her about the danger of his nearness, something that was totally unnecessary. She was all too conscious of the risk here. Then she realized he was alerting her to the sound of Patrick’s door opening again.

  Leo had been right. Apparently the young man had returned to his room only long enough to collect something. She heard him emerging into the corridor, and in that instant something entirely unexpected happened.

  The storm clouds parted just long enough to permit the sun to break through. Jennifer could feel its warmth on her back, was dazzled by its light streaming into the alcove. A brilliance that threatened them.

  The shadows of their bodies were cast out across the floor of the corridor. A silent but clear betrayal of their presence. All Patrick had to do was glance in the direction of the alcove, and he would know they were there.