Scepter of the Ancients (2 page)

“Yes,” she said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. “At least there’s that.”

“You’re one of his nieces, then?” the man asked. “You’re not stealing anything, you’re not breaking anything, so I’d guess you’re Stephanie.”

She nodded and took the opportunity to look at him more closely. She couldn’t see even the tiniest bit of his face beneath the scarf and sunglasses.

“Were you a friend of his?” she asked. He was tall, this man, tall and thin, though his coat made
it difficult to judge.

“I was,” he answered with a tilt of his head. This slight movement made her realize that the rest of his body was unnaturally still. “I’ve known him for years, met him outside a bar in New York when I was over there, back when he had just published his first novel.”

Stephanie still couldn’t see anything behind the sunglasses; they were black as pitch. “Are you a writer too?”

“Me? No, I wouldn’t know where to start. No, but I got to live out my writer fantasies through Gordon.”

“You had writer fantasies?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Oh. Then that would make me seem kind of odd, wouldn’t it?”

“Well,” Stephanie answered, “it would
help
.”

“Gordon used to talk about you all the time, boast about his little niece. He was an individual of character, your uncle. It seems that you are too.”

“You say that like you know me.”

“Strong willed, intelligent, sharp-tongued, doesn’t suffer fools gladly … remind you of anyone?”

“Yes. Gordon.”

“Interesting,” he said. “Because those are the exact words he used to describe you.”

The man’s gloved fingers dipped into his waistcoat and brought out an ornate pocket watch on a delicate gold chain.

“Ah,” he said, “I must be off. It was good to meet you, Stephanie. Good luck in whatever you decide to do with your life.”

“Thank you,” Stephanie said, a little dumbly. “You too.”

She felt the man smile though she could see no mouth, and he turned from the doorway and left her there. She found she couldn’t take her eyes off where he had been. Who was he? She hadn’t even gotten his name.

She crossed the space to the door and stepped out, wondering how he had vanished from sight so quickly. She hurried down the stairs and reached the large hall without seeing him. She opened the front door just as a big black car turned out onto the road. She watched him drive away, stayed there for a few moments, then reluctantly rejoined her extended family in the living room, just in time to see Fergus slip a silver ashtray into his breast pocket.

L
IFE IN THE
E
DGLEY
household had always been fairly uneventful. Stephanie’s mother worked in a bank, and her father owned a construction company, and she had no brothers or sisters, so the routine they had settled into was one of amiable convenience. But even so, there was always the voice in the back of her mind telling her that there should be more to her life than
this
, more to her life than the small town of Haggard, which was tucked quietly into the east coast of Ireland. She just couldn’t figure out what that something was.

Her first year of secondary school had just come
to a close, and she was looking forward to the summer break. She didn’t like school. She found it difficult to get along with her classmates—not because they weren’t nice people, but simply because she had nothing in common with them. And she didn’t like teachers. She didn’t like the way they demanded respect they hadn’t earned. Stephanie had no problem doing what she was told, just so long as she was given a good reason why she should.

She had spent the first few days of the summer helping out her father, answering phones and sorting through the files in his office. Gladys, his secretary of seven years, had decided she’d had enough of the construction business and wanted to try her hand as a performance artist. Stephanie found it vaguely discomfiting whenever she passed Gladys on the street, this forty-three-year-old woman doing a modern dance interpretation of
Faust
. She had made herself a costume to go with the act, a costume, she said, that symbolized the internal struggle Faust was going through, and apparently she refused to be seen in public without it. Stephanie did her best to avoid catching her eye.

If Stephanie wasn’t helping out in the office,
she was either down at the beach, swimming, or locked in her room listening to music.

She was in her room, trying to find the charger for her mobile phone, when her mother knocked on the door and stepped in. Melissa Edgley was still dressed in the somber clothes she had worn to the funeral, though Stephanie had tied back her long dark hair and changed into her usual jeans and running shoes within two minutes of returning to the house.

“We got a call from Gordon’s lawyer,” her mother said, sounding a little surprised. “They want us at the reading of the will.”

“Oh,” Stephanie responded. “What do you think he left you?”

“Well, we’ll find out tomorrow. You too, because you’re coming with us.”

“I am?” Stephanie said with a slight frown.

“Your name’s on the list; that’s all I know. We’re leaving at ten, okay?”

“I’m supposed to be helping Dad in the morning.”

“He called Gladys, asked her to fill in for a few hours, as a favor. She said yes, as long as she could wear the peanut suit.”

They left for the lawyer’s at a quarter past ten the next morning, fifteen minutes later than planned thanks to Stephanie’s father’s casual disregard for punctuality. He ambled through the house, looking like there was something he’d forgotten and he was just waiting for it to occur to him again. He nodded and smiled whenever his wife told him to hurry up, said, “Yes, absolutely,” and just before he was due to join them in the car, he meandered off again, looking around with a dazed expression.

“He does this on purpose,” Stephanie’s mother said as they sat in the car, seat belts on and ready to go. They watched him appear at the front door, shrug into his jacket, tuck in his shirt, go to step out, and then pause.

“He looks like he’s about to sneeze,” Stephanie remarked.

“No,” her mother responded, “he’s just thinking.” She stuck her head out the car window. “Desmond, what’s wrong now?”

He looked up, puzzled. “I think I’m forgetting something.”

Stephanie leaned forward from the back to take a better look at him, and spoke to her mother, who nodded and stuck her head out again.
“Where are your shoes, dear?”

He looked down at his socks—one brown, one navy—and his clouded expression cleared. He gave them the thumbs-up and disappeared from view.

“That man,” her mother said, shaking her head. “Did you know he once lost a shopping center?”

“He what?”

“I never told you that? It was the first big contract he got; his company did a wonderful job, and he was driving his clients to see it when it was done, and he forgot where he put it. He drove around for almost an hour until he saw something he recognized. He may be a very talented engineer, but I swear, he’s got the attention span of a goldfish. So unlike Gordon.”

“They weren’t very alike, were they?”

Her mother smiled. “It wasn’t always that way. They used to do everything together. The three of them were inseparable.”

“What, even Fergus?”

“Even Fergus. But when your grandmother died, they all drifted apart. Gordon started mixing with a strange crowd after that.”

“Strange in what way?”

“Ah, they probably just appeared strange to us,”
her mother said with a small laugh. “Your father was getting started in the construction business and I was in college, and we were what you might call normal. Gordon resisted being normal, and his friends, they kind of scared us. We never knew what they were into, but we knew it wasn’t anything …”

“
Normal
.”

“Exactly. They scared your dad most of all, though.”

“Why?”

Stephanie’s father walked out of the house, shoes on, and closed the front door after him.

“I think he was more like Gordon than he liked to let on,” her mother said quietly, and then her dad got into the car.

“Okay,” he said proudly. “I’m ready.”

They looked at him as he nodded, pleased with himself. He strapped on the seat belt and turned the key. The engine purred to life. Stephanie waved to Jasper, an eight-year-old boy with unfortunate ears, as her dad backed out onto the road and put the car in gear, and they were off, narrowly missing their trash can as they went.

The drive to the lawyer’s office in Dublin City
took a little over an hour, and they arrived twenty minutes late. They were led up a flight of creaky stairs to a small office that was too warm to be comfortable, with a large window that offered a wonderful view of the brick wall across the street. Fergus and Beryl were already there, and they showed their displeasure at having been kept waiting by looking at their watches and scowling. Stephanie’s parents took the remaining chairs, and Stephanie stood behind them as the lawyer peered at them all through cracked spectacles.

“Now can we get started?” Beryl snapped.

The lawyer, a short man named Mr. Fedgewick, with the girth and appearance of a sweaty bowling ball, tried smiling. “We still have one more person to wait on,” he said, and Fergus’s eyes bulged.

“Who?” he demanded. “There can’t be anyone else; we are the only siblings Gordon had. Who is it? It’s not some charity, is it? I’ve never trusted charities. They always want something from you.”

“It’s … it’s not a charity,” Mr. Fedgewick said. “He did say, however, that he might be a little late.”

“Who said?” Stephanie’s father asked, and the solicitor looked down at the file open before him.

“A most unusual name, this,” he said. “It seems
we are waiting on one Mr. Skulduggery Pleasant.”

“Well, who on Earth is that?” asked Beryl, irritated. “He sounds like a … he sounds like a … Fergus, what does he sound like?”

“He sounds like a weirdo,” Fergus said, glaring at Fedgewick. “He’s not a weirdo, is he?”

“I really couldn’t say,” Fedgewick answered, his paltry excuse for a smile failing miserably under the glares he was getting from Fergus and Beryl. “But I’m sure he’ll be along soon.”

Fergus frowned, narrowing his beady eyes as much as was possible. “How are you sure?”

Fedgewick faltered, unable to offer a reason, and then the door opened and the man in the tan overcoat entered the room.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, closing the door behind him. “It was unavoidable, I’m afraid.”

Everyone in the room stared at him, stared at the scarf and the gloves and the sunglasses and the wild fuzzy hair. It was a glorious day outside, certainly not the kind of weather to be wrapped up like that. Stephanie looked closer at the hair. From this range, it didn’t even look real.

The lawyer cleared his throat. “Um, you are Skulduggery Pleasant?”

“At your service,” the man said. Stephanie could listen to that voice all day. Her mother, uncertain as she was, had smiled her greetings, but her father was looking at him with an expression of wariness she had never seen on his face before. After a moment, the expression left him and he nodded politely and looked back to Mr. Fedgewick. Fergus and Beryl were still staring.

“Do you have something wrong with your face?” Beryl asked.

Mr. Fedgewick cleared his throat again. “Okay, then, let’s get down to business, now that we’re all here. Excellent. Good. This, of course, being the last will and testament of Gordon Edgley, last revised almost one year ago. Gordon has been a client of mine for the past twenty years, and in that time, I got to know him well, so let me pass on to you, his family and—and friend, my deepest, deepest—”

“Yes yes yes,” Fergus interrupted, waving his hand in the air. “Can we just skip this part? We’re already running behind schedule. Let’s go to the part where we get stuff. Who gets the house? And who gets the villa?”

“Who gets the fortune?” Beryl asked, leaning
forward in her seat.

“The royalties,” Fergus said. “Who gets the royalties from the books?”

Stephanie glanced at Skulduggery Pleasant from the corner of her eye. He was standing back against the wall, hands in his pockets, looking at the lawyer. Well, he
seemed
to be looking at the lawyer; with those sunglasses, he could have been looking anywhere. She returned her gaze to Mr. Fedgewick as he picked up a page from his desk and read from it.

“‘To my brother Fergus, and his beautiful wife, Beryl,’” he read, and Stephanie did her best to hide a grin, “‘I leave my car, and my boat, and a gift.’”

Fergus and Beryl blinked. “His car?” Fergus said. “His boat? Why would he leave me his boat?”

“You hate the water,” Beryl said, anger rising in her voice. “You get seasick.”

“I
do
get seasick,” Fergus snapped, “and he knew that!”

“And we already have a car,” Beryl said.

“And we already have a car!” Fergus repeated.

Beryl was sitting so far up on her chair that she was almost on the desk. “This gift,” she said, her voice low and threatening, “is it the fortune?”

Mr. Fedgewick coughed nervously and took a small box from his desk drawer and slid it toward them. They looked at this box. They looked some more. They both reached for it at the same time, and Stephanie watched them slap at each other’s hands until Beryl snatched it off the desk and tore the lid open.

“What is it?” Fergus asked in a small voice. “Is it a key to a safety-deposit box? Is it, is it an account number? Is it … what is it? Wife, what is it?”

All color had drained from Beryl’s face, and her hands were shaking. She blinked hard to keep the tears away; then she turned the box for everyone to see, and everyone saw a brooch, about the size of a drinks coaster, nestled on a plush cushion. Fergus stared at it.

“It doesn’t even have any jewels on it,” Beryl said, her voice strangled. Fergus opened his mouth wide like a startled fish, and turned to Mr. Fedgewick.