Malarkey (11 page)

"What if I'd rather have it out now?" The road had changed
to highway. I picked up the pace.

"Hmm. Well, you may want to, but I'm pretty sure you won't
insist."

"Really? Why is that?"

He yawned again. "Because you always fight fair."

That silenced me as he knew it would. He slouched against
the door and fell asleep. I thought about turning on the Irish
broadcast at full volume, but I was not supposed to be petty.

My father was waiting at the door when I drew up in front of
the cottage. I set the brake and poked Jay.

He started and woke up completely, wide-eyed.

"We're here."

Dad had come out the door. Jay disentangled himself from
the seatbelt and got out. He gave Dad a hug. That surprised me until I
remembered that Jay hadn't seen my father since the stroke.

I popped the trunk lid and wriggled out of the car. My father
is about four inches taller than Jay. Arm still on Jay's shoulder, Dad
was guiding my husband into the cottage with the air of a squire
welcoming the heir to the manor house.

That's your son-in-law, Dad, I thought, cranky.
I'm
the heir
.
I hefted the garment bag and the computer from the
trunk and carried them into the house. "Porter service."

Jay smiled at me. "Thanks. George looks terrific, doesn't
he?"

I had to smile back. "Grand is the local word for
terrific."

Dad beamed on both of us like the rising sun. "This calls for
a drink. I have a bottle of Jameson's I bought on the plane."

I was scandalized. "Before lunch?"

"With. I made sandwiches."

Jay rubbed the back of his neck. "I suppose a glass of
Jameson's won't kill me." He rarely touches hard liquor.

"The tranquilizers!" I was doubly scandalized.

Dad said, "A spot of cheer, Lark. Lighten up."

I stared.

"It's what my students say."

So each of us had a shot of Jameson's, neat. I must say it
tasted good all the way down. Lunch was sloppy but generous ham
sandwiches.

I took Jay downstairs after that to show him the scene of the
crime, but he spotted the futon.

"Sleep." He ripped off his jacket and tie.

"You slept all the way through scenic Wicklow, the Garden
of Ireland."

"Too bad." He kicked off his shoes, lay down on top of the
duvet, and fell asleep. Like that.

The host is riding from Knocknarea
And
over the grave of Clooth na Bare,
Caoilte tossing his burning
hair
And Niamh calling, Away, come away.
Empty your
heart of its mortal dream...

Yeats, "The Hosting of the Sidhe"

I started a pot of spaghetti sauce while Jay slept and Dad
worked on his notes. The sauce took me about fifteen minutes. When
I finished, Jay was still asleep and Dad was still deep in the records of
the Dublin Meeting. So I shoved the pot onto the cool side of the
Rayburn and went for a walk.

Bright yellow crime-scene tape isolated the potting shed.
The Stanyon gardeners were working on the mucked up area of
lawn, raking out boot prints and replanting. I said hello and watched
the men a while, but my presence seemed to inhibit them. I climbed
back up the flagstone path and decided to see where the road led,
other than to the big house.

It tunneled through an arch of rhododendrons. In a week or
so, the rhodies would burst into exuberant blossom. Now the span of
dark leaves drooped like the gateway to the Underworld. I ducked
below it, shivering, and emerged into the open again. Gravel gave
way to packed dirt. The road skirted the pond I had seen from the
cottage the first day. The pond might at some time have been an
ornamental lake. Close to, I could see that it needed to be cleaned
out. Clumps of weed and twists of rusting metal had trapped human
and animal litter, but a couple of mallards swam in the turgid
water.

I walked past two roofless stone outbuildings. There the
lane shrank to the status of a path and dead-ended at a low stone
wall. I found a stile, climbed over it, and entered the Stanyon
woods.

It was a plantation, not a natural copse. Stately oaks, lesser
trees I didn't recognize, laurels, two giant hollies, male and female,
and assorted bushes that looked as if they were about to bloom
formed a screen to hide the fiduciary heart of the grove.

Beyond the screen, long before the Steins bought the estate,
some tree accountant had set out rows of conifers with spacing
appropriate to moderate growth. In the not distant future, the trees
would be harvested like wheat. The current accountant would see to
that. Perhaps Slade Wheeler would have seen to it when he tired of
his war games.

The trees looked tall and spindly in the gray light, and their
uniformity depressed me. Someone had mowed the undergrowth
that spring. I felt as if I were walking through a field of living
telephone poles. In a hundred years the great evergreen forests of
the Pacific Northwest were going to resemble Stanyon. Hundreds of
square miles of telephone poles.

Some of the conifers, I think they were Scotch pine, sported
red blazes as if a displaced timber cruiser had marked them for
cutting. It took me a few minutes to realize the marks were left over
from Wheeler's wargames.

When I stepped onto the mat of fallen needles I made no
sound. I walked without haste, trying to imagine what it would be
like to stalk and be stalked in this tame wilderness. The land sloped
upward, and a few bushes here and there had survived to provide
lurking places. Ferns sprouted like feather dusters over the mown
areas. Foreign birds sang. I couldn't decipher their song. It sounded
like a lament. A light wind brushed my cheek.

I was beginning to spook myself. In a lifetime of reading I
had encountered enough enchanted forests to know that Stanyon
Woods was too dull for magic. It wasn't even haunted. Slade
Wheeler's ghost, if it lingered at all, hugged the ground like a patch of
stale smog.

I made myself look for signs of a police search. The Gardai
had to have searched the woods for the site of the murder, if, as
Kayla said, they were assuming her brother was killed by one of the
game players. Once I put my mind to it, I spotted broken branches,
trampled ferns, scuffed needles. The cops had been there all
right.

I hiked upward, shoving branches aside when I had to. I
wasn't lost because I knew the woods were not a forest. If I walked a
quarter mile farther, I'd come to a cow pasture or a potato field
plowed and ready for seeding. When I stopped and looked around
me, though, I saw only the stiff rows of conifers. Watery gray light
sifted through the needles. I might as well have been lost.

As the thought formed, I caught motion at the edge of my
visual field. I whirled and stared. Nothing—a trembling of leaves that
might have been caused by the wind. I took another few steps and
stopped again, the hairs on the nape of my neck prickling. Somebody
or something was watching me.

I stood very still, though my berserker impulse was to run,
screeching, directly at the spot where I had sensed the intruder. Or
perhaps
I
was the intruder.

I breathed in, out. Finally, I started walking toward the
trembling bush. Slowly. With dignity. So what if there were game
players hiding in the woods? I thought of Grace Flynn's "protector."
He was shorter than I was and no heavier. I could handle Artie.

I parted the offending bush and entered a tiny glade.
Nothing. I said, "Okay, who's here?" Nobody answered. Then, on the
far side of the clearing, I saw the stone.

It was huge, a boulder of dolmen dimensions scabbed with
lichen, and it was splotched with red paint. As I walked over to it, I
caught what might have been the blur of someone else's passage in
the calf-high ferns. The trail, if it was a trail and not a trick of light,
led up the slope and into the trees.

I approached the stone warily. Nothing. A faint sound from
the woods halted me in my tracks. I listened until my ears ached but
heard nothing more and, indeed, it may have been nothing. The red
paint, a blotch at waist height, was dry to my touch. I leaned against
the stone and scanned the undergrowth.

The wind was picking up. Clouds scudded overhead. I
straightened and started to walk away. As I glanced back over my
shoulder at the stone, I saw the design. A huge double spiral in the
form of a figure eight lying on its side incised the flat surface. At the
heart of each vortex was an eye.

When I examined it, I could see the carving was ancient.
Indeed it was so overgrown with lichen it was visible only at an
angle, or up close if the observer knew it was there. I traced it with
my finger from the unblinking eyes at the center to the outer rim,
half-afraid that if I reversed and followed the maze inward I would
be sucked into the heart of the stone. My hand shook. I stood still so
long the birds started their song again.

Eventually the breeze picked up, the light changed, and I
came out of my reverie. It was time to go back to the spaghetti
sauce.

My mind had calmed. I reentered the woods without
trepidation, though there was no path and one row of trees looked
like the next. I had walked steadily up the slope. Now I walked
steadily down it. It was not until I reached the stone wall and found
the stile again that I realized I had forgotten the mysterious watcher
in the woods. He or it was irrelevant to the stone carving.

Dad was pottering around the Rayburn, heating water for
tea. He gave me a tentative smile. "Been for a walk?"

I nodded, not quite ready for speech. A glance at the kitchen
clock told me I'd been gone about an hour. I had the sensation that
something had happened, something important, but the meaning
eluded me.

While Dad brewed a pot of Earl Grey, I went downstairs and
poked Jay until he woke up. He'd had enough sleep, too much,
probably. If I let him sleep until he felt like waking, he'd spend the
night reading Anthony Trollope.

Finally, he flopped over onto his back and blinked up at
me.

I said, "Without prejudice to our quarrel, do you want to
make love?"

He blinked, grinned, pulled me down onto the futon.

Afterwards we showered in sequence, dressed, and went
upstairs. Dad had gone back to his notes. "Tea's cold," he murmured
without looking up. His pen made a squiggle on a photocopied
document.

It was ten past six. I set the kettle on the cooker and gave the
sauce a stir. It seemed to be stewing nicely. Jay took a drink of water
from the tap and made a face. I ought to have warned him to drink
the Evian water in the refrigerator. The tap water was potable, but it
had a chemical odor.

"Do you want tea or a cocktail?"

Jay raised an eyebrow.

"I just remembered that Barbara invited Dad and me to drop
in. The Steins hold a happy hour at six thirty. I should warn them
their cottage has another tenant."

"Well..."

"I could phone but it's a nice walk, and you might as well
take a look at the suspects." I described Kayla Wheeler.

His eyes narrowed. "Okay. Let's go. You can tell me about
the rest of the cast on the way."

We didn't leave immediately. I replaced the steaming kettle
with a large pot of hot water for the pasta and set the pot on the
cooler side of the Rayburn. When we returned I'd have water ready
to cook the spaghetti fast.

Dad didn't want to come. In fact, he was so absorbed in his
notes I'm not sure he registered where we were going. I made Jay
unpack his anorak, and I put my own on, too, in case it rained. It was
well past the equinox, so the sun hadn't set and wouldn't for a couple
of hours. We strolled along side by side.

Jay said, "Wanna fight?"

I stopped and blinked at him. His whiskey-brown eyes met
mine. Something had happened all right. My anger no longer burned
with a pure and gemlike flame. "No. Not now. Maybe not at all, Jay,
but we do have a problem, and we're going to have to talk about
it."

He was wearing his impassive face. "Wonderful what good
sex can do."

I drew a breath. "No, my friend. Do not delude yourself. The
sex was fine, but the problem exists."

He frowned and started to say something, then shrugged
and walked on. "So tell me about the folks at Stonehall
Enterprises."

I filled him in, starting with my discovery of the body, and I
gave him a sketch of the dinner party, too.

"Kennedy sounds like a clown."

I considered. "Only in the sense that he's funny. He's a
shrewd observer. He probably used Maeve Butler's invitation as an
opportunity to meet with the Stonehall people when they were off-
guard. I think his experience with this kind of crime is limited."

Jay snorted.

"What?"

"I don't know anybody with experience of the setup you
described. It's one of a kind."

I had meant that I thought Sgt. Kennedy's experience of the
executive-level milieu was limited. Jay was patronizing me. I felt a
flare of anger and bit it back. We walked on in silence.

"So Kennedy was scoping out the victim's business
associates. That means the chief inspector, what's his name—"

"Mahon."

"Whatever Mahon may have told the dead man's sister, he
isn't sure Wheeler was scragged by one of the kids."

"Or Sergeant Kennedy isn't sure."

"You think he's running his own investigation?"

"I think he knows the area, and the boys involved in the
game, better than Mahon does."

"You may be right."

"I am. Occasionally."

"What do you mean—" We had come to the fork in the road.
Jay broke off and stared down at Stanyon Hall. "Where are we, the
Magic Kingdom Annex?"

"Stanyon does have a Disneyesque air. Wait till you see the
wood carvings inside, and the stained glass in the library."

He shook his head. "It reminds me of Beverly Hills."