The Murder Hole (26 page)

The room was, however, large enough for a
single bedroom. Maybe Iris was aware of the ghost and didn’t want
to stampede any guests. Maybe she simply needed the storage space.
The room had never been renovated. Large areas of the floorboards
were free of varnish and deeply scratched. The swirls of the
plaster ceiling were stained as though by candle soot. The sprigged
wallpaper was faded and tattered. Like the velvet in the glass case
in the library revealing the shapes of vanished antiquities,
slightly darker rectangles showed where pictures had once hung—the
framed Nessie photos that were now downstairs, perhaps?

Jean stepped further into the room. The air
was still and cold and smelled of wet dog combined with something
sweet. Wrinkling her nose, she tilted the two paintings toward the
light. Neither was an original Van Gogh or a stolen Rembrandt,
more’s the pity.

One was a portrait of a young woman. Jean
recognized Eileen, although this painting was earlier than the
photo in the library, before circumstances had whetted her
features. Her pose was a graceful curve from her bowed head with
its stylish bobbed hair to her dropped shoulder to the rosebud
dangling from her listless hand. Her Art Deco earrings were
interlaced silver-nubbled ribbons studded with either gems or
glass. The dreamy smile on her averted face suggested she was
considering some secret fancy beyond the frame of the picture.

Was that what Ambrose had seen in her, a Mona
Lisa to his Leonardo, the embodiment of his romantic fantasies—over
and beyond her financial expectations, that is?

The other painting was a copy of one of those
turgid Victorian domestic scenes that had hit the bottom of
contemporary taste so hard they were probably about to bounce back
into popularity. Jean let the paintings and their dingy frames fall
back into place and opened one of the cardboard boxes to reveal an
ancient set of encyclopedias. Aha, here was the source of the musty
smell. Gagging, she folded the top of the box back down and opened
the other boxes.

One held what looked like dusty old
needlework curtains or bed hangings, half eaten-away by time and
mice, exuding an odor that reminded Jean of over-ripe roses . . .
She sneezed. Quickly she glanced into the third box to find
tissue-wrapped dishes. Not fine Chinese porcelain, just ordinary
earthenware. Perhaps these were the dishes from which Ambrose and
Eileen had taken their tea in the summerhouse.

Whatever, there was nothing in the room that
rose to the level of personal papers. She hoped the police crew had
unpacked the boxes, because the only way she was going to do it was
if the Holy Grail was hidden beneath those curtains, and her
particular brand of ESP didn’t run to homing in on sacred
relics.

Just as Jean turned toward the door, she
noticed a yellowed square of cardboard lying beneath one of the
chairs. She picked it up. Ah, here was another trace of the police
search—the dust was just as thick beneath it as anywhere else on
the floor.

She turned the cardboard over to see a faded
photo of Ambrose and Eileen dressed in wedding garments, posing in
front of a man wearing clerical garb. Each tea-colored photo-face
was very stiff and correct, as though trying out for a dictionary
illustration of the word “propriety.”

Jean’s first thought was to wonder what the
minister had thought of Ambrose’s arcane tendencies. Her second was
to note that while Ambrose and the minister were the same height,
Eileen’s white-veiled head didn’t even reach her groom’s shoulder.
She must have been tiny, shorter than Jean herself, perhaps only
five feet tall. Her face was so smooth and unlined, lacking the
topography that years would carve, that in the glare of the
photographer’s lights it faded almost to invisibility. Ambrose’s
horse-length face, however, was so craggy that the shadows painted
it starkly, making him look older than he had been—about
thirty-five, if Jean remembered correctly. Eileen had not survived
to be thirty-five.

Jean set the photo down on the chair,
wondering why it wasn’t in the house. Maybe Iris didn’t know it was
here? But she had to know that her mother’s portrait was here.

Shutting the door to the no-longer-mysterious
room, Jean grabbed her night clothes and proceeded to the bathroom.
She felt bruised all over, but didn’t actually find any black and
blue patches except for around her knee. Not even on her upper arm,
where Alasdair had grasped her like a cat a kitten, gently between
bone-crunching jaws. She hated to think what Roger looked like. But
envisioning Roger naked, with or without bruises, was not on her
list of priorities.

She wondered what Eileen had thought on her
wedding night. Although people wouldn’t necessarily get naked even
for that occasion, not in an era ending even as Ambrose climbed
into bed with his young and winsome wife.

Jean stepped into the shower cubicle and
turned on the hot water. Oh my, yes—she hadn’t realized how cold
she was until the hot water sluiced over her shoulders and down her
back. You couldn’t beat a hot shower or bath for pure
sensuality.

Not that her own wedding night had been
particularly sensual. She and Brad had been so young, they’d never
enlisted in the sexual revolution, and so went into battle with
less than basic training, book-learning only. Which was more than
an upper-class girl like Eileen probably had. Ambrose, now, he’d
been a soldier. And Gordon Fraser had said Ambrose was too much
like Crowley when it came to women. Jean couldn’t see Ambrose with
groupies, but you never knew.

Even she, when she’d been young and a
prisoner of her own nervous system, had found Brad’s still waters
appealing. Comforting, in a way. Safe. Then she’d realized his
still waters not only didn’t run deep, they didn’t run at all.
Ghosts? Monsters in the loch?
Yes, dear, if you say so. Pass the
salt
.

The years in Brad’s damping field had layered
her nerves with insulation. During the lawsuit she’d used that
insulation for survival, then realized she was looking at no more
than surviving for the rest of her life. And now, thanks to fate
and Alasdair Cameron, she was pressed up against the window of her
own personality, watching trains going round and round, and
jack-in-the-boxes leaping upward, and drums drumming and pipers
piping and even that partridge sitting in a pear tree pulling its
own feathers out. Be careful what you ask for.

She’d asked to find herself. Maybe “herself”
included Alasdair, whose waters ran deep and fast indeed beneath
his shell . . . .
Don’t go there
, she told herself. And she
answered,
It’s too late for that, too
. She and Alasdair were
destined to go there and back again, although what would happen
then she couldn’t imagine. Or could, rather. That was the problem.
The scenario was playing out the way she—the way both of them—had
both feared and anticipated.

Jean let the stream of hot water wash away
any remaining mud and soothe the bruises and aches. Let it erode
the rough corners of her own ego. If it wasn’t about Alasdair, it
wasn’t about her, either. Ridiculous, that she’d find a potential
lover more threatening than a letter-sending, boat-exploding,
attack-driving criminal.

Suddenly she felt claustrophobic. The cubicle
seemed like a coffin. Turning off the water, she stepped out,
grabbed a towel, and congratulated herself for taking a shower
without imitating any classic Hitchcock scenarios.

Lotion, hair-dryer, flannel nightgown, thick
socks, a terry-cloth robe, and she was shocked to see the bedside
clock showing ten-thirty p.m. Surely it was three or four a.m.
Sunday morning. But no, Saturday went on, and on, and on. Or could
have been cut as short as her life, less than two hours ago.

Once again practicing denial, Jean collected
her laptop and carryall, bundled up the duvet from the bed, and
headed for the stairs. She more wired than tired. She might as well
read the transcripts. That would give her an excuse to call
Alasdair tomorrow and eat some crow, feathers and all . . .

She stopped dead in the center of the hall.
Hadn’t she closed the door to the mystery room? It was standing
open, the shapes inside looking like stoop-shouldered gnomes in the
darkness. She managed to reach around the armload of duvet without
scraping her nettle-stung hand and pull the door shut. The latch
clicked into place. Check.

Not one other sound disturbed the chilly
stillness of the house.
Okay
, Jean thought, and limped on
toward the stairs wondering just how many doors she’d closed
recently, and if any of them were likely to open back up.

Between her stiff, sore knee and the duvet,
she had to negotiate her way carefully down the steep staircase.
Maybe Eileen had met her fate on the stairs, maybe not, but Jean
didn’t intend to join her in the fourth dimension and ask.

Between the soothing aura of the electric
fire and the soothing aura of the sleeping cat, the living room was
almost hot. Just as Jean dumped her things on the couch, her
twitching ears picked up the sound of voices. She tiptoed to the
window and peeked out between the closed drapes. Alasdair’s
constable was confronting the Ducketts. “. . . just wanted to see
if she needs anything,” Patti was saying.

“Glad to hear she’s all right,” added Dave.
“Accidents can be fatal, you know.”

“She’s resting,” the constable stated, which
was more polite than
No kidding
.

Even though they apparently felt honor-bound
to support a compatriot in her hour of need, the couple ceased and
desisted. On their way into the house they passed the lanky figure
of Martin Hall, identified by the fiery dot of a cigarette at his
lips. Above them all, lights gleamed from the top of the tower. Was
someone there, or were the lights on an automatic timer?

The constable was wearing a yellow slicker,
which shone spectrally in the last cloud-filtered gleam of
midsummer, but none of the others were using umbrellas. The rain
must have stopped. Jean turned away from the window, wondering if
she’d ever see her own umbrella again. It had probably been
trampled or run over or both. Well, better it than her.

She poured herself another cup of tea,
sponged off her muddy bag, and turned off the electric fire. On the
coffee table she arranged all her journalistic implements—her
laptop, the photo of the Pitclachie Stone, copies of passages from
books and newspapers, Internet print-outs, the books on Nessie and
on Crowley, Roger’s press release and the Omnium brochures. And,
last but not least, the envelope with the transcripts. Most of the
notes in her notebook had been saved on her laptop—all she’d lost
was another layer of insulation from her nerves. But Alasdair or no
Alasdair, she wasn’t going to assume the vanishment and the
not-an-accident were cause and effect. Not yet, anyway.

Jean settled down on the couch, tucked the
duvet snugly around her, and picked up the new addition to her bag
of tricks, the old copy of
Loch Ness: the Realm of the
Beast
. She fanned the yellow-rimmed pages and her nostrils
puckered.

At Fraser’s table in the open air, all she’d
detected was a whiff of mildew and something sweet. Now, after the
book had spent several hours in a plastic shopping bag in her
wardrobe, that whiff had intensified to a charnel house stench. The
book had been steeped too long in this damp climate, in a storage
shed or barn, perhaps. The librarian with the beautiful Thai name
would be appalled.

Holding the book gingerly, at arm’s length,
Jean inspected the flyleaf with its faded autograph:
To my dear
E., remembering the good times, Ambrose Mackintosh
. Then she
turned to the copyright page. This book hadn’t been published by
Mandrake, defunct in 1930, but by another obscure if perhaps less
controversial press in 1932, the year before Eileen’s exit and
Nessie’s entrance.

Jean leafed through the book carefully enough
to ascertain that it was identical to her paperback edition. Then,
with an unladylike snort to clear her nasal passages, she set it on
the coffee table and fished out her cheat-sheet on Ambrose. Born
1886, the Crowley years and WWI, married 1922. He was a gentleman
scientist, an enthusiastic amateur like Schliemann at Troy, except
his archaeological work met Indiana Jones’ definition of the
word—“smash and grab.”

Roger, too, had evoked Schliemann, and by
inference, Jones. If not as far out on the pseudo-science limb as
Ambrose had been, still Roger was a similar character. Jean thought
suddenly that the prime mover of events was not Roger and his
expedition, but Ambrose and his adventures along that uncertain
shore where myth and fact overlapped, a coastline she herself knew
only too well.

The Water-Horse of Loch Ness
was
published in 1934, following Ambrose’s spate of articles about
Nessie-sightings.
Pictish Antiquities
, his last effort at
validation by an increasingly professional archaeological
establishment, was published in 1939, just as another war drove the
final nail into his way of life. He’d lingered until 1970, servants
long gone, the house falling into disrepair, but there was no
record of him doing more than brooding here in his ivory tower, his
fortress of solitude . . .

The cat leaped onto Jean’s feet. She jerked,
then laughed and patted the animal’s sleek head. He kneaded the
duvet, a cat attractor if ever there was one, and lay down beside
her. At least he hadn’t landed on her sore knee. Nothing like being
so preoccupied she’d missed him jumping down from the chair.

She looked around the room—no, she hadn’t
missed anything else. The less-than-brilliant overhead light
reflected off the glossy photo of the Stone, so that it looked as
though it were radiating energy. Some inanimate objects did have
auras, Jean had heard, and the Stone seemed as likely a candidate
for one as any. She wondered yet again just why Ambrose had never
set the Stone up. But that was about number fifteen on her list of
questions, number one being:
Why had Jonathan Paisley been
killed?