Ashes to Ashes (13 page)

She snatched the garment away from him. “Maybe some of the local punks decided to indulge in a little vandalism. I did have a difference of opinion with Steve over his dog. But then, I saw him in town, too.” She slumped onto the threadbare carpet and sorted her earrings and cosmetics into their respective containers. Her contact lens case was safe. So was the earring snagged in the fuzz of the bedspread. Nothing was missing.

Michael rescued clock, tape player and typewriter and separated them. After a good five minutes’ meditative silence he said, “Rebecca?”

“Mm?” She got up, hung her skirts beneath their corresponding blouses, and returned them to the wardrobe.

“Is it worse tae think o’ vandals breakin’ in, or tae think o’— well, the poltergeist you mentioned?”

Every nerve ending in her body went numb. “What?”

Michael dropped on the edge of the bed. He spoke hoarsely, as if the words were forced through a sieve of pride and fear in his throat. “Why do you think I jumped when you caught me up in the Hall— yesterday, was it?”

“I startled you.” Don’t, she wanted to order him. I don’t want to hear it.

“You thought you’d seen me in the window.”

“Yes.”

“I wisna in the window. I’d been in the Hall at least an hour. Listenin’ tae the footsteps on the stairs like I listen tae them at night.”

Rebecca sat beside him, her head in her hands, pressing her poor overstuffed mind back into her skull.

“This mornin’ you asked me when I’d got to bed; you were listenin’ tae them yoursel’. The bluidy great tackety boots goin’ up and doon, up and doon, until you’re fair mad wi’ the noise.” He dropped his voice even lower. “And the lights. I didna turn on the lights the night. I didna turn them on three nights ago, when I was here alone and a’ the lights came on.”

“It’s a dream,” she insisted, “it’s a hallucination, it’s only imagination. There’s some logical reason!”

“It’s a flamin’ adventure just tae go tae the loo!”

Through her teeth Rebecca said, “If it’s that bad why don’t you leave?”

He snorted in humorless laughter. “Gie up my job, go home wi’ my tail between my legs, and tell everyone I was scairt of ghosties and ghoulies? Are you daft, woman?”

Oh all right. She wouldn’t insult him by asking him why he hadn’t told her this yesterday. At least it explained his reaction when she’d told him she’d already been through the house. Some of his reaction. It didn’t explain his resentment.

Rebecca forced herself to sit up straight. Outside the bedroom the ceiling light in the corridor illuminated the closed door into the piper’s gallery. Her mind was, it seemed, shedding wisps of nasty pink stuff over all her preconceptions. Those edges of reality she had thought so hard and sharp fuzzed disconcertingly out. “I thought any good Scot would grow up believing in ghosts,” she said.

“Admittin’ strange things happen, aye. But no runnin’ away from them.” Michael sat with his elbows propped on his knees, also staring out the door. “There’s something goin’ on here, whether by supernatural or human agency I dinna ken. If it’s supernatural I’m inclined tae think it’d happen anyway, like that philosophical tree fallin’ in the forest. We’re just here tae acknowledge it. If human— well, that’s another matter.” He paused, and then asked rather too carefully, “Will you be leavin’ the noo?”

And back we come to where we started: you want me gone. With a profound sigh Rebecca got up, put Ray’s picture in the depths of the wardrobe and began picking up shards of glass. If Michael registered her disposal of the photo he didn’t react.

Did you saw through the chair in the prophet’s chamber? she wanted to ask him. Are you counting on all this nonsense about ghosts and intruders and Loch Ness monsters in the bathtub, for all I know, to run me off?

It wasn’t nonsense. That was about the only thing she knew for sure.

Her mind was too tired to think anymore; frustrated anger thinned into weary bewilderment. Silently she and Michael sorted out the bedcovers and made the bed. “Well, then,” he said, “I’ll turn off the lights, shall I?”

“You’re a braver man than I am, Gunga Din,” she told him.

He grinned. The grin was stretched fine and taut, but it was a grin. “I’m hopin’ the museum’ll no mind my puttin’ in for combat pay.”

“Haunted-house shell shock,” she agreed, and gave him the key from her purse. She stood listening while he turned off the lights in the lower stories and locked the door with a grinding and clanging like sound effects from “The Fall of the House of Usher”. When he came back up the stairs, he threw her a quick, wry salute before going on to the fourth floor. His quiet steps echoed for a few more minutes. Apparently he’d survived the expedition to turn off the lights. Or else something had sprung out on him from the sudden darkness.

Rebecca shook herself and walked to her window. She shaded her eyes with her hand and looked out into the wild night. The trees and lawns were pitch black except for spills of light from her room and Michael’s. And for a quick glint that she might have imagined, close to the forest. From the dovecote, maybe, headlights reflected from the road as the trees thrashed in the storm. She drew the curtains, hurried into her pajamas, turned off the lights in the bathroom and hall, and slammed the bedroom door firmly behind her. It had no lock. Great.

She sat on her bed brushing her hair, hoping the aspirin she’d taken would quell her headache. But even her chest seemed to be filled with cotton candy; each breath she took felt fluffy and sticky. Rain pattered against the window and the wind sobbed around the turrets. A thunk from overhead must be Michael dropping his shoes; yes, there was the other one. At least there was someone in the house with her. Of all the things she had to be frightened of, surely she didn’t have to be frightened of Michael. Irritated, annoyed, scunnered, as he would say, but not… . Her hand clenched on the hairbrush.

He seemed perfectly rational. So, probably, did your average mass murderer. Maybe she should be frightened of him. Just because he went all misty over the old songs didn’t mean he wasn’t a liar. He could be faking his mercurial manner, even the ebb and flow of his accent, to hide cold calculation. He would have to be a superb actor, but stranger things had happened. He’d said so himself.

The room was damp and chill. Rebecca left the bedside lamp on, the shade focusing the light into the corner, and mummified herself in the bedclothes with only her eyes and nose emerging. Her bones crawled with dread. She’d wanted an adventure but this wasn’t what she’d had in mind.

Michael couldn’t be staging an elaborate charade to get her out of the house. If he’d trashed her room he’d have had to trash his, too, to make her think it was an outsider. Unless he meant for himself to be so obviously the only suspect she wouldn’t suspect him… . The end of her thought snapped her mind. He couldn’t. She’d be a prize chump if he was.

She moaned; aspirin was simply inadequate for a headache of these dimensions. A flamethrower might have helped.

Ray would’ve nodded sagely and told her yet again that her imagination was pathologically overactive. But it wasn’t her imagination. Something
was
going on here. Even if Dracula and a team of werewolves were living in the lumber room, she wouldn’t go crawling back to Ray.

If Eric had been here tonight, he might have seized the opportunity and offered to spend the night with her, just to protect her. Although even his slightly overenergetic hormones would realize that would be rushing things.

Next to the bed, her face glossed by the light of the lamp, Elspeth Forbes looked out into nothingness. Social morality had changed since her day. Now recreational sex was acceptable. Rebecca writhed under the blankets and discovered that outside the warm print of her body the linens were the temperature of a marble slab. She jerked her toes and elbows back into the cocoon.

Was that a footstep outside her door? She lay, straining every sense, trying to hear beyond the tick of her clock and the torrent of wind and rain. She could always look out and see if it was Michael. Yeah. She might as well fly as open that door. It wasn’t a footstep. No. It wasn’t.

The question was whether whatever was happening here, supernatural or not, was threatening. The question was whether she should cut her losses with Dun Iain, research, education, academic brownie points, and run away. But that was no choice. Her self-respect hinged on her staying here.

Rebecca’s nostrils flared. Odd, the scent of lavender was completely gone. The theoretical vandal must’ve taken the air freshener from the wardrobe. But if she had never been able to find it, how had he, she, they… . Someone giggled. The sound was gone as soon as she heard it, but she had heard it. Someone in the hallway outside her door had giggled.

Don’t be childish! It’s just the old house talking to itself! Rebecca pulled the covers over her head and started counting crowned heads— Duncan, Macbeth, Malcolm, Donald Ban— desperate for the unconsciousness of sleep.

The sauce was thickening nicely. Rebecca stirred it with one hand and arranged the broccoli in the baking dish with the other. Meowing pitiably, Darnley wove himself in and out of her legs, his eye on the chicken breasts simmering on the stove.

“Oh, all right!” she exclaimed, and peeled off a portion of the meat. As the cat trotted away with his booty Michael’s voice shouted, “Good mornin’!” Rebecca was not at all surprised the final syllable had the upward twist of a question. “Good morning,” she called. “In the kitchen.”

The night had lasted, it seemed, well into eternity. Rebecca had dozed fitfully, waking again and again to find the rain still pouring and the wind still blowing through the darkness. At least, she told herself, if there had been footsteps, she had not been able to hear them.

When at last a blessed glimmer of dawn lightened the overcast, she had ventured out, only to discover the window in her bathroom was open. The lid of the toilet, which she had left lowered, had been raised, so that the seat was covered with icy raindrops. She had not been amused.

Rebecca poured herself another cup of coffee and set the teakettle on the burner. She’d also not leaped to the assumption that the open window had been Michael’s doing, despite his comment about the adventure of going to “the loo”. Ghosts must be capable of practical jokes; she’d heard a giggle outside her door. She suppressed the quick ripple of her spine.

Today Michael was wearing a “Monty Python” sweatshirt. He approached the stove and observed, “You’re cookin’,” with the diffidence he might have accorded Lucrezia Borgia. Maybe, Rebecca told herself, he’d spent half the night wondering if he should be afraid of her.

She took the saucepan off the burner, wiped her hands on her apron, reached for her coffee mug, and took a long grateful swallow. The cobwebs in her mind shriveled and disintegrated. Eric deserved a medal for providing Dun Iain with a coffeepot. “Yes,” she said, “I’m cooking. We have to eat the food I brought day before yesterday, but we’re going out tonight.”

“We are?” Michael asked, with a bright blue sideways gleam. He checked the temperature of the kettle and dumped tea leaves into the pot.

Oh. She’d never told him. “My friend Jan in Putnam invited us to dinner tonight. If you’d like to come.” Rebecca poured sauce over the broccoli, arranged the chicken, finished with a dusting of cheese. “Move,” she ordered, and as Michael skipped aside thrust the baking dish into the oven. “Ah,” he said. “Americans, are they?”

For a fleeting moment she thought he meant the chickens. “Jan and Peter Sorenson? Americans are mostly what grow around here.”

“I’d like to meet some normal Americans,” he said wistfully.

Rebecca laughed. So far the poor Scot had met only the occupants of Dun Iain, who probably reminded him of the cast of
Arsenic and Old Lace
.

Michael deftly poured boiling water into the teapot. “You don’t think they’ll be servin’ tuna casserole?”

“Jan’s a good cook, never fear. I was supposed to warn you, though, that they have kids.”

“I have three nephews. My sister and I call them Huey, Dewey and Louie. If I can put up wi’ them I can put up wi’ anything.” He poured a mug of tea, added milk and sugar, drank. His expression went as blank and mellow as Ray’s did after successful completion of a page in
The Joy of Sex
.

She had to think of that. Grimacing, Rebecca warmed up her coffee. She and Michael leaned against their respective patches of counter, exchanging wary glances over their individual mugs of restorative. In the cold, gray light of morning her suspicions of him the night before seemed absurdly paranoid. “So you think the house is haunted?” she asked, taking the plunge.

He shook his head. “It could be that Steven Spielberg’s set up a special effects lab in the attics.”

“Cognitive dissonance. Your mind isn’t equipped to deal with unfamiliar input. So you try to familiarize it.”

“Telling yourself it’s all in your imagination. I don’t know,” Michael confided, “whether I was more frightened of the unfamiliar, as you say, or of goin’ mad. But when it happened to you, too— well that was all right.”

“Thanks,” she replied dryly. “Although having ghosts in the house does add flair to the proceedings. If there weren’t any, we’d have to make some up, just to spice up the state’s advertising brochure.”

“Old things do have an air about them. Rizzio’s guitar, for example; you can just feel what it must’ve been like, can’t you?”

“Oh yes.” He was a closet romantic, no doubt about it. She’d have to stop teasing him about it. “James used to say the things wanted to go home.”

“They wanted to, as if they were alive? Aye, I think they probably would have done.”

Plunging even further, she admitted, “I dozed off in the prophet’s chamber and dreamed I was at Culloden.”

“Culloden,” he repeated sadly. “What a waste.”

Rebecca sipped her coffee. That had been more of a vision than a dream. Dreams didn’t move objects around and turn on lights.

“The question,” said Michael, “is whether there are ghosts, spirits, psychic forces— whatever you want— or just bloody-minded humans. And whether it really matters. We still have to live with it.”