“A true reporter must make sacrifices,” Nigh said.
“Ah, yes, I see what you mean.”
Nigh worked to keep from grimacing. She knew that yet another gossip story would soon be all over town. Would it be told that Nigh had just been trying to get a story out of Jace? “What I want to know is if Mr. Montgomery looked at anything besides information about Priory House when he was in here last week.”
“Actually, he did,” Mrs. Wheeler said. “As you well know, for years, that man Hatch has refused to enter anything from Priory House in the annual garden competition. Mrs. Browne and I, as well as Mrs. Parsons, think it’s irresponsible of him. Mr. Montgomery seems to want to change that.”
“Change the garden contest?”
“At least make Priory House enter it. I know that the entire village is tired of hearing how Hatch’s plants would win over everyone else’s. I think there should be a fair competition and—”
“Could I see the article Mr. Montgomery was looking at?” Nigh asked, interrupting what was sure to be an hours-long tirade. She didn’t know what Jace had been reading, but she’d put money on it that it wasn’t about the local garden contest.
“Here it is,” Mrs. Wheeler said, handing Nigh the roll of microfilm.
There was a lot on one roll of film and since Nigh didn’t know what she was looking for, it took her nearly two hours to find it. It was a small article that took up little space compared to the pages of news about the coming garden contest, which was the biggest event of the year in Margate.
It was a report of a suicide of a beautiful young American woman. Had it been the suicide of a local, it would have been given the front page. But the people of Margate didn’t like to think that an outsider would come to their village and use it for unpleasant purposes. There was a time when Margate wasn’t as clean and “pure” as it was now, and people wanted to forget that time. The old pub, with its unsavory characters, was gone. The Carews had bought the pub and made it for families. Everyone was embarrassed that such an awful thing had happened in their village.
Nigh punched the buttons to make copies of both entries about the suicide, then paid Mrs. Wheeler for them and left the library. She had to promise to talk to Mr. Montgomery about making Hatch enter the contest. “He can make Hatch do things about as well as he can make Mrs. Browne do them,” Nigh muttered as she went to her car and left the articles. Then she walked to the pub.
As she hoped, Emma Carew was there alone, getting ready to open for lunch at eleven. When she saw Nigh, she unlocked the door and put the kettle on.
“I know this couldn’t be a social call, so how can I help you?” Emma asked.
“Am I that transparent?”
“The whole town has been abuzz with your running off with that gorgeous Montgomery. So how is he in bed? Fantastic, right?”
“I haven’t been to bed with him.”
Emma looked at Nigh in disbelief. “But everyone said—”
“What do they know? He’s been doing some research and I’ve been helping him. It’s all business.”
“Too bad. And I’m disappointed in you. A big-city girl like you, I would have thought that you…” She trailed off, then shrugged. “Sometimes my imagination gets the better of me. So what can I help you with?”
“Is this between us?” Nigh asked.
“Sure. I like to hear the gossip, but I don’t spread it. For instance, I won’t disappoint all the women in this town and tell them you haven’t been to bed with that beautiful man. They wanted to hear details.”
Nigh smiled. “It’s kind of you to keep my secret. I was told that Mr. Montgomery and Clive Sefton spent some time together here talking. Do you know what it was about?”
Emma looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was behind her, then leaned toward Nigh and lowered her voice. “I can’t let George hear me because he’ll go ballistic. He’s threatened to ban Clive if he mentions the incident again. Well, not incident, but the death.”
“The suicide,” Nigh said.
“Exactly. Clive thinks it was murder, but that’s impossible. We were here in the pub, working, and the woman took sleeping pills and killed herself. I told Clive that she’d been crying and I think she was miserable. Besides, her mother and sister came here and showed us papers about the girl. She’d had a lot of mental problems.”
“So why does Clive think she didn’t commit suicide?”
“Two things,” Emma said in disgust as she poured two cups of tea. “One is that she looked happy as a corpse, and second, she tripped on the stairs.”
“Tripped on the stairs?”
Emma told Nigh Clive’s theory about how the stairs had been changed, so he knew that the young woman had been to the pub before.
“What if she had been here before?” Nigh asked. “Maybe she was unhappy, wanted to die, and this was a familiar place.”
“That’s exactly what I said!” Emma said.
“But Clive didn’t believe you.”
“Hardheaded, he is. And I think he deeply disliked the girl’s mother and sister, who came over from the States. He didn’t like that they showed up with papers saying the girl was mentally unwell, but I thought that was wise of them. It took away any doubts the rest of us had about why she’d done it.”
“The newspapers said she’d had a fight with her boyfriend. Did you meet him?”
“He didn’t show up at all. I heard he was in London. Couldn’t have cared too much about her, could he? He was in London but didn’t bother to come to Margate, but her mother and sister flew in from the States. That told me what he was like. She should have put pills in his drink, not her own.”
Emma sipped her tea. “Why this sudden interest in this? Clive has never stopped talking about it, then this man Montgomery comes in here and says he wants to write English murder mysteries and did we know any. Clive starts on the suicide and they move to a booth and talk for an hour. Is it true that Montgomery wants to write?”
“Yes, I think so.” Nigh was thinking about the suicide and wondering what else she could find out about it.
“He should write about the lady highwayman,” Emma said. “Did you know that when that movie came out it was the most watched movie in English history?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Nigh said, uninterested. She cared as much about Lady Grace as Jace did, which was not at all.
“So how is he?”
“Who?” Nigh asked.
“Mr. Montgomery. The man who is the topic of all conversation in the village. Him. You know, the man you spent days with but didn’t bed. That man.”
“I haven’t seen him in days.”
“The greengrocer’s son said he brought you back from the station late yesterday afternoon.”
“He’s grown, hasn’t he?”
“His mouth has grown. I can see that you don’t plan to tell me anything.”
“Sorry, Emma, but I have a lot on my mind. I have to go.”
“If I were you, I’d hide out for a while. People in town are a bit angry with you over the Ghost Center thing.”
“Big mistake on my part. Sorry. Thanks for the tea.”
Nigh left the pub and went to the parking lot behind the library. She sat in her car for a while, looking at her notebook, reading what she’d written. She reread the copies she’d made of the facts about the suicide.
She wasn’t sure and had no proof, but she felt sure that Jace was the boyfriend mentioned in the article. Is that what he was so sad about, that he’d caused a woman to commit suicide? Or had he tried to save her and failed? Had he tried to save her even though she’d had a history of mental problems?
Nigh leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She remembered how Jace had taken care of her after she’d found out she’d been talking to a ghost. He’d taken charge and known exactly what to do. She knew that he’d spent the night with her. She was sedated but she knew she hadn’t dreamed him beside her.
If Jace was such a caring man, may
be he’d taken on a mentally disturbed woman and tried to keep her from harming herself. But he’d failed. She’d killed herself anyway.
But Clive didn’t think she had committed suicide.
“Read between the lines,” she’d heard her editor say a hundred times. “Read what they’re not saying.”
She looked back at the two articles taken from the newspaper and read them again. Emma had raised a good question. If her fiancé was in London, why wasn’t he called? Nigh smiled because she realized that it was all right there. Ralph had written the story, and now he might be the editor of only a village newspaper, but before he retired he’d worked in Edinburgh on a big paper for all his working life. He knew how to report the facts.
The fiancé in London wasn’t called because they didn’t have his name or number, Nigh thought. They had called whomever Stacy Evans listed in her passport as who to call in an emergency. Nigh imagined Jace in London, looking for his fiancée, being frantic about her, while her mother and sister were flying in from the United States.
So why didn’t they call Jace? He was never seen in Margate. Clive had never met him, so he was never connected with Miss Stacy Evans.
As Nigh went over the articles again, she began to get a clearer picture of what had happened. If there was one thing she knew about Jace Montgomery, it was that he wasn’t hard to talk to. A man who was open to ghosts and the extraordinary things that had happened to him since he’d arrived in Margate wasn’t a man who’d force some woman to marry him.
Nigh would like to go to Ralph’s house and ask him questions, but he’d taught her that when it comes to reporting there is no such thing as “off the record.” If she expressed doubt about a suicide, Ralph would probably report it in the next issue. And worse, Ralph would probably figure out that there was a connection between the suicide and the man everyone in Margate seemed to think Nigh was having an affair with.
“I wish,” she said out loud as she turned the key in the ignition. She glanced in the rearview mirror to see if anyone was behind her, then froze. Standing on the grass, on the other side of the pavement, was Danny Longstreet. He was smiling at her, and when she looked at him in the mirror he raised his hand in a wave. He had on his riding clothes, an outfit that hadn’t changed much in many years, but she could see now that it was different, old-fashioned, out of date.
Quickly, she turned to look out the back window. She saw nothing. There was no one there, just the grass, a wire fence, then the pasture beyond.
She put her hands over her face and sat there for a moment. Danny Longstreet had followed her to Margate. Would he follow her to her house? Haunt her? Was she going to live in fear of seeing ghosts everywhere she turned?
She took a deep breath, then opened her car door and got out. She marched across the parking lot to the grassy patch where she’d seen Danny. “I’m not going to stand for this,” she said out loud. “I am not Ann Stuart! Do you hear me? I may look like her and be a distant cousin, but I’m not her. Ann is at Priory House and I suggest you go there now! Do you hear me? Oh!” she said. “Good morning, Mrs. Vernon. Looks to be a nice day.”
The woman scurried past Nigh as quickly as she could.
“You heard me and I mean it!” she said under her breath, then got back in her car.
Jace wandered about Priory House for most of a day. After he sent Nigh to the train station yesterday, he’d gone to the local library and tried to find out more about Danny Longstreet, but there was nothing. Everywhere he turned, he was told that Mrs. Fenney and Tolben Hall had everything. At last he had to face it: There just wasn’t much about Danny or his father.
He spent another night at Tolben Hall, but left early the next morning, without having Mrs. Fenney’s fry-up. He stopped at a roadside restaurant and had a bowl of sticks and twigs cereal and whole wheat toast, but ate only half of it. When the pretty waitress asked him if he’d like something else, he almost told her to fry the bread, but he didn’t.
He drove back to Margate, arriving just as the sun was coming up, and the sight of the ugly old house depressed him. He’d never liked it, never wanted it.
He managed to bypass Mrs. Browne and get to the chintz room without being seen. But as he looked about the room, he suddenly hated the way it was a reproduction of Ann’s room. He hated the wallpaper that had cost him so much, hated the Victorian furniture. In fact, at the moment, he seemed to hate everything.
He went to the closet, unscrewed the floorboard, and took out Stacy’s photo. For the first time since her death, he didn’t feel as close to her, didn’t feel as though she was in the room with him.
He looked out the window toward the village and thought he saw a streak of yellow. Maybe it was Nigh’s outrageously bright Mini Cooper that she drove at breakneck speed, careening around corners.
For a moment he smiled at the memory of being with her while she drove his Rover across rocks, a fallen tree limb, down a creek bed, then back up the side of it at an angle that had made his stomach clench. When she’d first started driving, he’d been terrified, but when he saw that she knew what she was doing, he kept his fears to himself. He held on and gave her the respect that such driving deserved.
Last night at Tolben Hall he should have been going back through the papers in the box about the Longstreets. Maybe he’d missed something. Maybe there was something important in there that he hadn’t seen.
But, instead, what did he do? Hooked his computer up to a land line and went on the Internet to read about N. A. Smythe, the reporter. He saw a short video of her in the Middle East, and winced when a bomb went off not far from her. He read half a dozen accounts of the cameraman who’d been killed while standing beside her. After that happened, there were few articles about her or by her. She’d been quoted as saying that she needed to take some time off, then there was nothing.
He’d gone to bed at midnight and dreamed of the kind of things Nigh must have seen. He awoke at four, dreaded the long wait until breakfast was served, but then decided not to wait. He left Mrs. Fenney a note and crept out at five.
On the long drive back to Margate, Jace thought about how much he’d enjoyed the trip down when Nigh was with him. He was sure she’d noticed that he refused to talk about the time he’d known Stacy.
There was a part of him that wanted to talk about Stacy, wanted to ask Nigh her opinion. But he knew he couldn’t do that. If he was right and someone had murdered Stacy, that person could still be living in Margate. The person who had sent Stacy the note to meet him at Priory House could still be in the village. He hadn’t met anyone who she might like, but—
He had a thought so startling that he nearly ran off the road. What about Jerry Longstreet? Maybe he was the reason his ancestor, Danny, had appeared to Nigh. Maybe Danny knew that Jerry had killed Stacy. Maybe—
So many thoughts went through Jace’s head that he had to make an effort to watch his driving.
When he got back to Priory House, he was bursting with questions, but who to ask? If he asked Mrs. Browne, he was sure she’d say that it was none of her business—then she’d call one of her awful women friends and tell them that Jace was asking about Jerry Longstreet. Jace couldn’t imagine what kind of gossip would follow that tidbit.
Hatch wouldn’t know and if he did, he wouldn’t tell. Gladys and Mick were too interested in each other to notice anyone else. The maids were…
Jace well knew that the only person he wanted to talk to was Nigh.
At lunchtime he went downstairs and ate in silence while Mrs. Browne fussed about his actions of the last few days.
“Driving an expensive car like that,” she said. “I never! If you had any sense—”
Jace had had enough. He picked up his plate and went to the door. “From now on, Mrs. Browne, I’ll eat in the dining room.”
He heard her usual “hmph!” but he also thought he heard a “yes, sir.”
At 3:30, it started to drizzle outside. He’d jogged for an hour and even taken a nap, but it
was now only the middle of the afternoon. He was in the small sitting room off the kitchen that no one used, a room he had never before spent any time in. A fire was burning and the rain was streaking the windows. He should have been content to read more of the books about the history of Margate, but he couldn’t seem to sit still.
“Excuse me, sir,” came a voice and he turned to see Daisy the flirt standing there. He really hoped she wasn’t going to make one of her little come-ons to him. “Mick gave me this to give to you.”
“What is it?” he asked cautiously.
“A note.” She looked both ways down the hall to see if Mrs. Browne was anywhere near. “I think it’s from Nigh,” she whispered.
Jace was on his feet in seconds, but Daisy’s knowing smile made him slow down. When she stood there watching him, waiting for him to open the envelope, he gave her a look to go away. She left, giggling.
Jace closed the door, then went to stand by the fire to read the note.
Sorry to bother you, but thought you’d like to know. I saw Danny Longstreet this morning.
Nigh
A grin so big that it almost broke the skin spread across Jace’s face. “Very serious problem,” he said aloud, then nearly ran to the telephone in the hall.
Nigh answered on the first ring. “Hello?”
Jace took the smile off his face. “You weren’t hurt, were you?” he asked solemnly. “By Danny, I mean.”
“No,” she said, sounding a bit breathless, as though she’d run to get the phone.
“Were you scared?”
“Actually,” Nigh said, “he made me angry. I got out of the car and bawled him out.”
“Good for you.”
“Maybe,” she said, “except that old Mrs. Vernon was walking her dog and I think I may have given her a real fright.”
Jace laughed. “I’m glad to hear you weren’t frightened.”
“I was still too embarrassed after the first time to collapse again. I do apologize for that. I certainly wasn’t keeping up the British tradition of stiff upper lip.”