Authors: Lillian Stewart Carl
She went upstairs, got her typewriter and her notebook, put together sandwiches of plain and carbon papers and typed three letters outlining her suspicions. When she’d addressed the envelopes she put the letters in her purse. They wouldn’t be mailed to Sheriff Lansdale, Chief Velasco, and Benjamin Birkenhead until Monday. She’d give Eric and Dorothy a chance. If they didn’t take it… . Well, she’d told each recipient of her letter the other two had a copy; each man would have to act just to save face. They couldn’t all be involved.
Rebecca went upstairs feeling slightly sick to her stomach. Michael was layering paper, kindling, and pieces of wood from a crate in the sixth floor fireplace. “Does the chimney work?” she asked.
“I’ve laid muckle fires in mountain bothys wi’ poor excuses for lums. Look.” He took a match from the box on the mantelpiece, lit a spill of newspaper and held it in the maw of the fireplace. A chill draft whisked the smoke cleanly away. The wind whimpered in the chimney. Michael looked up at her with a slim, distracted smile.
“Okay,” she said, returning the smile in kind.
Rebecca selected an inventory and sat down. She checked off a stack of Minton tiles, each carefully nestled in tissue paper. A bell-shaped pot, a Bronze Age funeral beaker. Brass Victorian kitchen ware from Neidpath Castle. A coin of King James V. When a faint swish-crunch of wheels penetrated the moan of the wind she rose and hurriedly clutched the back of the chair. Her limbs were petrified with cold, her feet numb. She hobbled to the window and saw a Datsun creeping through flakes of snow the size of saucers. What was Heather doing out here on a Saturday morning? Afternoon, she corrected, noting with surprise the angle of the hands on her watch.
Michael was sitting by the wooden box containing the haunted artifacts of Mary Stuart. But he was staring beyond the box at Elspeth’s window, abstractedly, not as if he saw something there.
Rebecca went off flapping her arms and stamping her feet, trying to get her blood circulating again. By the time she arrived in the entry it was reverberating with dull thunks. She pulled back the bolt and opened the door. A small bundled figure was kicking at it, arms filled with a knapsack and a wicker picnic basket. Rebecca had to look twice at the circle of face peeking out between stocking cap and muffler to make sure it was Heather. My goodness, the girl had quite attractive hazel eyes. Rebecca had never seen them before, impacted as they’d always been in black liner, mascara, and shadow.
She took the basket. Heather laid down the knapsack and emerged from her polyester chrysalis. “Hi!” she said, with the brittle, and probably equally false, cheer of a department store Santa.
“Hello,” returned Rebecca quizzically.
Heather threw her garments over the recumbent form of Queen Mary. Rebecca blinked; the marble face seemed to wince at such lese majeste. “I was over at the Pruitts,” Heather said, “and Mrs Garst came by with some food for them, and she said she was going to bring you some, and since I was coming out here anyway I said I’d bring it for her.”
So Dorothy’s cuisine tracked them through the storm. “Thank you. Would you like some cocoa?”
“Yes, please.”
Rebecca put on a pan of milk and peered into the basket. A congealed salad peered back at her, queasy orange Jell-O clotted with carrot strips and crushed pineapple. Another dish held gray hunks of hamburger meat laced with green peas and instant rice like bits of Styrofoam.
Exhaling through pursed lips, Rebecca closed the basket, fixed Heather’s cocoa, and made a fresh pot of tea. The girl’s hair, she decided, must be dyed that dismal black; it contrasted shockingly with a rosy complexion that owed its beauty to youth, not to artifice. But her expression was middle-aged, abused by gravity into a tragic mask.
Heather realized she was under surveillance. “I’m sorry, I rushed out of the house without my make-up.”
“You look just fine,” replied Rebecca, understating the issue.
“I’ve run away from home.”
Rebecca stood, teapot aloft, as if the squashed remnants of the girl’s spiky hairdo had been the snaky coiffure of Medusa. “What?”
“I’ve run away from home.”
Yes, that was what she’d thought she said. Rebecca laid down the pot, pulled out a chair and sat. “Your parents must be terribly worried,” she said, although what she wanted to say was, Why descend on me?
“My dad’s away on business. He’s always away on business. My real mother lives in Indonesia. Sandra went to her garden club. They’re making wreaths for the mall or something. I decided I just wasn’t going to take it any more.” With a quick smug smile Heather drank some of her cocoa.
“Take what?” Rebecca asked.
The child uttered a word she had no business knowing. “Sandra lost her cool because I came in late last night. She just doesn’t understand.”
“You know mothers,” said Rebecca with a wan smile, “their ears just fold up on you.”
“Stepmothers at least. I couldn’t have told her anyway. I thought maybe you could help.”
Rebecca frowned; she’d missed a conversational connector somewhere. “Help with what?”
“I mean, when I was in your room that time— sorry about that and everything, but we’ve been over that… . “The girl waved her hand airily, dismissing past mischief. “I saw your birth control pills, so I figured you were, well, experienced.”
Rebecca wasn’t sure what to reply to that. She doubted the girl wanted a lecture on the sharp pecks of the birds and the harsh stings of the bees.
Heather said, “I think I’m pregnant.”
“Good God!” Rebecca took a gulp of tea and it stuck like a thistle in her throat. She sputtered, “And you’re afraid to tell your parents?”
“You know what they’d say?”
“I can make pretty good guess.” Someone moved in the entry. Michael and his British sixth sense had scented a cuppa and arrived in the doorway just in time for the shocking news. Heather turned, saw his stunned expression, and ducked into a defensive huddle.
Rebecca fixed a mug of tea, took it to the door, and pressed it into Michael’s hands. “Christ,” he hissed under his breath, “don’t you people have all night chemist’s shops? All the lad had to do was buy… ”
“And I suppose you’ve always been a paragon of self-restraint,” interrupted Rebecca, turning him around and applying a firm push to his shoulders. “Go away. The last thing she needs now is a man!”
“Well, excuse me!” he said, and went back up the stairs.
Heather emerged from her crouch. “Is he gone?”
“Have you told Steve?” Rebecca asked.
Heather’s face wavered into the most peculiar expression, part exasperation, part amusement. “No, I haven’t. What could he do?”
“I’m not sure marriage is an option.” Foolish little Heather— she had her life ahead of her— look at Dorothy, her past sins returned to haunt her. Rebecca sat wearily down at the table. Her job description hadn’t included being Putnam’s Dear Abby. “How much overdue are you?”
“A couple of weeks. More or less. I’m never that regular.”
“Then it might be a false alarm. But for heaven’s sakes, Heather if it is… . “She wanted to say, don’t do it any more, but the girl’s trusting gaze made every one of her own past indiscretions float wraith-like before her. “Get some information on birth control, okay?”
“Okay. But if it’s not a false alarm?”
“Tell your parents. And Steve. You can’t run away from it.”
“Oh.” Heather considered that, her face set with the artless adolescent self-absorption that drives adults mad. “Can I stay here tonight?”
Rebecca caved in. “If you call Sandra and ask. Tell her the snow’s too heavy for you to drive safely. That usually works.”
Heather jabbed truculently at the phone. Rebecca sipped her tea and listened to the girl’s half of the conversation. Although she could also hear most of Sandra’s; the woman was shrieking so loudly Heather held the receiver a foot from her ear. Finally Rebecca, suppressing a groan, interceded. “Mrs. Hines, this is Rebecca Reid. Yes, Heather is here with me. You know she helps with the cleaning. Yes, the roads are pretty bad, she should stay. Yes, I’ll make sure she earns her keep.” What Sandra said about ungrateful stuck up stupid Heather made Rebecca wince.
She hung up and turned to the girl. “You’re all right for tonight. I suggest you use the time to do some serious thinking. About Steve, for one. I’m sure he’s a nice kid, but… ”
“Love is worth everything,” Heather said.
“No, it isn’t,” retorted Rebecca. “But that particular romantic fancy is one you simply have to outgrow.” The girl shrugged, unconvinced. Rebecca sighed— people who lived in emotional glass houses shouldn’t throw advice. “Are you hungry? Get some food and then come on up to the top floor.”
“Thank you!” Heather dived on the picnic hamper. “I’ll wash the dishes, too, okay?”
“Okay,” Rebecca said, smiling at the girl in spite of herself. Had she ever been that young? These days she felt as if she’d been born forty.
She found Michael in the ballroom, holding his cup and staring out a window. She walked up beside him and looked down on the tire tracks in the driveway, on the trees and dovecote half concealed in swirling white confetti. The wind sang, its words just beyond hearing, only the eerie melody audible. “There’s some food downstairs if you want it. Dorothy’s, I’m afraid. The Jell-O doesn’t look too bad.”
He turned to her, but his eyes were focused about two feet beyond her back. The angle of his brows indicated deep thought. “Right. Thank you kindly.” He wandered off across the room, still holding the cup she’d seen was empty, and sat down by a pile of boxes.
So she’d insulted his masculinity. Tough. Rebecca sat down, shifted, cataloged a few items, shifted again. She forced herself to concentrate. More ephemera, letters and documents. A Chinese vase from Fyvie Castle. A collection of 1950’s advertisements for refrigerators, including one for the model downstairs. It was some time later that she stood and stretched, pleased at the boxes standing properly labeled. Almost four o’clock.
Michael was gone. When had he left? Shaking her head, Rebecca started downstairs. The stairwell was dim, evening seeping in already. No one was on the fifth floor, or the fourth. Michael’s room was its usual defiant mess. Her own room was inhabited; Heather lay on the bed. She stirred as Rebecca looked in and muttered, “Thought I’d take a nap.”
“Go right ahead. Be my guest.” Rebecca tucked the girl under the blankets and flicked on the heater. Usually cold gloom made her sleepy, too, but not today. Today her nerves wriggled like insects stuck on pins.
The second floor was deserted. Drifts of shadow filled the corners of the Hall. On the gallery Elspeth’s portrait was turned so that her face peeked through the railings. In the empty kitchen the tea pot was cold. No Michael.
Rebecca looked into the store room. The dark mass of the boxes seemed to shift and grumble, inching forward in the corner of her eye. She shut the door on them. Of course. Michael was in one of the little rooms on the sixth floor. She started back upstairs not sure just why she was looking for him. On a stretch of staircase that five minutes before had been empty lay all seven crystal bottles in a neat row like a roadblock.
Rebecca stood staring. The chill lavender-scented draft in the stairwell raised the hair on the back of her neck. And then the hush was broken by the grotesque crash and clatter of the dishes in the pantry.
She spun around. The crash of the dishes was a natural phenomenon, nothing alarming… . She went back down anyway, leaving the bottles, turning on lights as she went. The pantry door was closed. She opened it.
China shards lay strewn across the stone floor amid the crumpled shapes of the covering cloths, their bright colors like blood on a wound. One entire shelf of dishes had been swept clean, only shapes in the dust marking where they’d been stacked. Rebecca’s jaw dropped, her brain stammered.
No lavender. Not one whiff did she smell in the pantry. Michael? Why would he throw down the dishes? She looked into the sitting room. Darnley was curled up on the couch grooming his tail. He looked at her. She looked at him. No, he was too surefooted to have knocked the dishes down.
Rebecca turned. A dark faceless figure stood just behind her. She leaped back. Her heart exploded in her chest, pushing a gasp from her throat.
“Miss Reid, it’s me.” The nasal voice was trimmed of its adolescent whine. Furtive lashless eyes peered through the holes of a ski mask. Black coat, jeans, gloves and an eye-searing Cincinnati Reds scarf— it was Steve Pruitt.
Rebecca collapsed against the sitting room door as oxygen percolated painfully into her brain. “Where did you come from?”
“I— er— I had a key,” Steve said. “I came to get Heather. She said she was coming out here. I don’t want her out here.”
A little late to be assuming responsibility, Rebecca thought. “She’s here. Come on.” Rebecca hauled herself up the staircase, Steve’s boots clomping behind her. On the one hand she was grateful for the noise, on the other she wanted to tell him to be quiet, he was disturbing the tense silence of the house. “Did you walk in from the road?”
“Yeah. Snowplow’s been there already.”
In the bedroom Steve called Heather’s name and shook her. No response. Rebecca, frowning, got a wet cloth and slapped her face. Heather moaned and fell inert again. “What’s the matter with her?” Steve lifted one of her hands and dropped it. It fell limply, with a small thud.
Rebecca tried to remember what her sister-in-law the vocational nurse had once told her. She gently pried open one of Heather’s eyes. Her pupil was a grain of black in a dull iris.
“She’s on something?” Steve asked.
Rebecca shot a sharp glance at him. No, Heather hadn’t been despondent. It must be… . Oh, come on now. She led Steve back downstairs and swept Darnley from his perch on the couch. In the kitchen she offered him a piece of meat from Dorothy’s casserole. He sniffed at it, hissed, contorted his body and with a snag of claws in Rebecca’s sweater leaped and ran.
Rebecca threw the casserole, dish and all, into the trash and washed her hands. With all those pill bottles clanking in her purse Dorothy hadn’t had to go far for inspiration. But she’d intended the drugged food for Rebecca and Michael, not Heather. Rebecca didn’t have to guess why. She’d forced Dorothy’s hand by telling Eric the game was up.