Writ on Water (14 page)

She scowled. The Patricks were making a habit of using her in a non-professional capacity, and while she didn't mind some of it, she was tired of being a human shield. It wasn't fair of her to blame Rory more than MacGregor for the situation, but she saw it as a case of diminished capacity. MacGregor was old and couldn't help being like he was. Rory, she hoped, knew better. Claude was
his
cousin—-that made him Rory's problem, not hers.

The flight reflex died once she had a closed door between her and the rising tempest of the dining room. For a moment, Chloe toyed with going back to the nursery anyway and offering Rory some company while he attempted resuscitation of the rootlets, but she was tired and feeling miffed, and opted for a book and bed and a mild case of guilt instead.

But once between the sheets, Chloe found her mind feeling overshadowed by the weight of history, wandering back over the other Patricks who had lived in the house before MacGregor and Rory. Her reading of the previous day had shown that they were people with large families, large bank accounts, and large peculiar ambitions. They hadn't feared life, or death. Indeed, they had planned for both—and with more attention than they had paid to other, more common goals.
Given the family's age and wealth, there should have been Patrick statesmen and Supreme Court justices, captains of industry,
fame
to go with the fortune. But there weren't.

She got up and began to pace.

The plantation itself had managed the miraculous feat of avoiding the attentions of the twentieth century tourist industry that had been born with the creation of the automobile. This was mainly due to the careful screens provided for the never-ending Patrick wealth, accumulated by some unspecified means—she was voting for piracy or something else disreputable since the family records were so coy on the subject.

Chloe frowned. It was all so very odd. She had never encountered anything like it on her other projects. It wasn't just that the Patricks had spent a king's ransom in acquiring, perhaps illegally, statuary by the great artists of Europe; most great families from the pharaohs to the Tudors had done the same. But they had chosen that their immortality be achieved in funerary art that would never be seen by the wider world, and that suggested a familial arrogance that bordered on the pathological. Was that possible? Could this be a form of inherited obsession? And if it were a mental illness, then maybe they
were
conscienceless enough to be pirates. The Tidewater region had certainly seen a good deal of illicit trade in earlier times.

The theory sounded pretty far-fetched, but she
more than anyone knew that certain families could inherit . . . gifts. Tendencies.

She'd had a vision in the back of her mind when Roland first spoke of sending her to Virginia. Riverview would be like some of the other places she had worked in Georgia and South Carolina, antebellum mansions with wide porticos hemmed in with old oaks twisted with nutgall, surrounded by feral lilacs, festooned with spanish moss—spanish
pineapples
, she corrected, the thought of Rory's lecture about the wondrous non-moss easing the stern lines of her face. Places that were preserved, but not lived in. Or perhaps something like Williamsburg, which was inhabited by actors rather than real people.

But Riverview wasn't like that. It was more like Brigadoon, or some other magical place where time stood still. The twenty-first century might knock at the gates, but no admittance was being granted.

She wished that she might have met some of the previous owners. It would be like seeing a unicorn or a fairy. MacGregor Patrick came from some original stock. Perhaps if they brought in a spiritual medium . . . ?

The half-joking thought made her suddenly uneasy. MacGregor was already talking to ghosts. He didn't need to be encouraged down this path—and Rory would probably strangle her if she brought it up.

Her eyes wandered over to the painting by the dresser. She had noticed it before. It was a peculiar
thing, and vaguely familiar in an unpleasant way. Almost modern in flavor, like some of the art done by fantasy and science fiction artists, though she couldn't imagine that it was. She leaned forward and squinted at the brass plate screwed to the frame:

The Death of Rebellious Absalom Richard Dadd 1857

Chloe shivered and backed toward the bed, suddenly questioning the wisdom of her own desire for a little mental
séance
with the Patrick dead. They must have been a very strange family, collecting not just funerary art, but stuff like this painting. Dadd had been a nineteenth-century painter of immense talent who just happened to see fairies and hear spirit voices, which on one occasion sent him home to cut his father's throat. Judged to be insane, he had been confined to Bedlam and then Broadmoor where he happily went on with his artistic, spiritually guided career.

She wasn't sure of the exact date of his incarceration, but it was in the first half of the nineteenth century. To have acquired a painting in 1857, someone would have had to journey to Broadmoor Prison and commission the work. Supposedly all his artwork of that era belonged exclusively to Broad-moor, but it wasn't amazing that some wealthy Patrick had managed to get a painting anyway.

What
was
amazing was that they wanted one at all.

She stared at the tiny face of anguished David. It was mirrored in the face of the rebellious dead son and the stunted, stubby-limbed angels that surrounded them. They had nasty smiles that reminded her of Isaac.

In spite of the lingering heat, Chloe felt suddenly chilled. Those weren't angels that gathered over David! Of course not, Dadd didn't see angels. The creatures were imps. Malevolent, staring imps waiting to torment and torture their victim.

“Ugh!”

Going back to the painting, she lifted the canvas down from the wall and carried it across the room. It took a moment to shove her clothes aside, but she found the perfect storage place at the back of her wardrobe.

The door closed with a solid thump and she made sure the latch was securely closed. As an added measure of caution, she dragged a chair in front of the armoire. She didn't mind being near the dead and their attendant grisly reminders of human mortality out in the cemeteries, but she didn't want them following her to bed and pursuing her in dreams.

She stood for a moment, staring at the blocked door and belatedly debating the wisdom—and politeness—of shoving a valuable work of art into a cupboard. Chloe decided she didn't care
about offending MacGregor or Rory. There was no way that she would be able to sleep with those dwarf demons staring at her. She would just explain to MacGregor in the morning where the picture was, so that no one would be alarmed at its disappearance.

Her heart was still thundering when she climbed back into bed. It was more than a little annoying to discover that she was actually nervous about sleeping under a particular work of art. It was crazy, but apparently superstitious fear was a virus inside her, latent until Riverview—-and maybe memories of Granny Claire—had brought it out. First there had been bad dreams, then a deep, unexplainable fear and loathing of Isaac Runyon, and now this squeamishness about a piece of art. She could only hope that this sensitivity didn't spill over into a distaste for cemeteries, because it would make things difficult if she started getting the whim-whams every time she stepped into a graveyard. Tombstones were the bread and butter of her work, at least for now. They weren't catapulting her to the top of the photographic world, but she was doing all right for having taken the road less traveled.

Shaking off her unease, Chloe reached for the pile of paperbacks on the bedside table. She hesitated a moment over her selection. She had started a mystery, but after her uneasy dreams the nights before, she decided that a romance might be in order. She wanted something soothing and uncomplicated,
where the good guy always won. She took up the new Lisa Cach and started reading.

Though feeling keyed-up, sleep came upon her quickly after midnight passed. Her weary eyes closed against the lamplight and the paperback slipped from her nerveless hands.

He brought the shovel down with all his might, sinking the blade deep into the earth and shattering what he hoped were old tree roots and not a desiccated skeleton. This one was difficult, so much harder than the other, and he was growing tired. The failing darkness was bleeding the energy out of his muscles and bones. He feared that he would not have the strength to burrow all the way to hell, which was where this one belonged, dead or not.

Bringing Runyon to Riverview had been a bad mistake—-a fatal misjudgment. The man had been greedy and wanted to take what wasn't his. He hadn't understood that there were some things that could never be permitted. To ask for money was one thing. Or perhaps to take a painting or some silver. But what he had wanted was impossible, and once he knew the secret, there was nothing for it but to get rid of him.

It was a shame that he'd used the shotgun. The stinking blood and bits of tissue were dripping into the ground. It would ruin the earth forever. But that was why he couldn't take the bits and pieces to the sacred place and hide them there. It would profane it—-unsanctify the soil and disturb the ones who slept there.

He paused for a moment, breathing hard as he rested on the shovel. His ears were ringing. Maybe it was from the shotgun blast, but he kept thinking that he heard the sound of glass breaking over and over again. It was terrible. He wished it would stop.

But really, the glass was nothing—just a thing. It didn't matter, because no one would understand it. Nothing mattered except finishing his task. He had to put the wicked one back into the ground and then leave before it grew light. After a while, he'd forget. Many times he had done things for his father, his uncle, and for the rest of the family. He always managed. He would triumph this time too. And no one would ever know about his mistake except the ghosts, and they were righteous spirits who would never bear witness against him.

Trapped inside another nightmare, Chloe whimpered and twitched as shovels of dry earth rained down on her. She was bleeding to death from a horrible wound and wanted to scream for help, but was afraid that if she opened her mouth it would be filled with soil and she would choke on clots of grave dirt. Soon she was too weak to scream or move. And in a few minutes the air ran out and then there was nothing.

Murder is a mistake—one should never
do anything one cannot talk about after dinner.
—Oscar Wilde

“If you are calling for the corpse of MacGregor Patrick, he's over here,” a familiar but unusually grim voice said.

Chloe ventured further into the darkened library and saw a well-known pair of large, grubby work boots protruding from under the desk. Rory Patrick stood over his horizontal father, broad hands planted on narrow hips. MacGregor was snoring softly, but other than the gentle whistle passing between his parted lips, he might have been posing for an effigy to grace his sarcophagus—supposing he decided to have a decorated sarcophagus as well as a pyramid, which seemed a nearly inevitable conclusion given his heritage and outsized ego.

“What happened?” she asked, curious but unalarmed
since Rory was so calm. Frankly, she felt worse than MacGregor looked.

“He had a duel with Misters Beam, Walker, and Daniels. I think he won, but it must have been a close contest.”

Chloe walked around the desk and saw the dead soldiers lying on the floor. She whistled softly and nudged an empty whisky bottle with her toe.

“I haven't seen anyone in a
ménage a quatre
with Jimmy, Johnny and Jack since college—and they had to use a stomach pump to save the poor fool who tried it. Alcohol poisoning. Those bottles weren't all full, were they? Should we call for an ambulance or something?”

“No way.” Rory smiled nastily and, mirroring her own action, nudged MacGregor with the tip of his loafer. He wasn't as gentle. “A stomach pumping might spoil a really prime hangover, and some doctor would likely give the old sot some pain pills for his head. No, this time I'm going to let him suffer through the aftermath without medical interference.”

“I suppose he
will
have a really bad hangover. Maybe—”

“Bad as the day after a hurricane, if there's any justice in the world. It may be just the thing to cure him of this binge drinking. Nothing Doc Emerson, Morag, or I can say seems to make any difference.” Rory forgot himself and actually sounded concerned. “This is probably Claude's doing. I bet he
tried to get MacGregor drunk enough to cough up the twenty grand he needs. MacGregor is the soul of generosity, but absolutely hates being hounded for money.”

As though recognizing his name, MacGregor snorted loudly, rolled his head, and then resumed his soft snores. His color was rosy rather than gray, but Chloe was still worried. Even with Claude's help, if the bottles had been full, there could be enough booze inside this old man with his weak heart to kill two males half his age.

“Do you want some help getting him to bed before you leave?” she asked finally, deciding that this was Rory's call to make. He was in the best position to judge what MacGregor needed.

“Bed?”

“Rory!” she scolded, genuinely shocked. “You aren't going to leave him on the floor, are you?”

“I suppose not. Morag might fuss about vacuuming around him. And
she
might call the doctor.” Rory leaned down and grasped MacGregor by the front of his flannel shirt. He hauled him more or less upright. Some dead oak leaves and a few sprigs of crushed mint floated to the floor. Rory dusted his parent off with his free hand, muttering: “I wonder what the hell he was doing last night. He changed before dinner, didn't he?”

“Yes, I think so.” Chloe answered with a twinge of guilt. She wasn't terribly certain what MacGregor had been wearing at dinner last night, having spent the meal staring at her plate, but she was
fairly sure it hadn't been red and black buffalo plaid flannel. And certainly he had not been covered in pungent mint and oak leaves.