Jace had bought a small stereo and some CDs, so he put on Mozart and began to unpack. Slowly, he unwrapped the wonderful things that Mick with his little old lady had found. “Hope it was all right that I gave her a hundred-pound note to say thanks,” Mick said, wanting to please his new boss, but also loving being able to tip someone a hundred pounds.
First, Jace made the bed. Thick, rough sheets that no amount of bleaching could make white again went on. A wool blanket next, then a beautiful, hand-crocheted spread that had little tassels on its diamond-shaped edges. Big, linen-covered pillows went next, plus a pretty little blue and white round pillow embroidered with wildflowers that nearly matched the wallpaper. Jace felt sure the woman who had chosen these things for Mick had enjoyed herself.
Jace unwrapped a dozen fragile little glass bottles and set them on the dressing table he’d bought. Ceramic dogs went by the fireplace, and two ballerinas on the mantel.
He opened another box. Gladys had stayed up late last night cutting out the photos she’d collected at Catherine’s husband’s home. She’d bought postcards and books and pamphlets, gathering all the pictures of Catherine and her children she could find. One by one, Gladys had cut the pictures to fit into the twenty-three Victorian frames that Mick had bought, and stuck an identification label on the back of each one.
Carefully, with slow patience and some drama, Jace unwrapped each portrait. Twenty-three times he made a show of where to set the frame. And each time he unwrapped one, he said aloud who it was. “Catherine’s next to youngest daughter, Isabella. She was born after you left, so you never saw her. She grew up to be almost as pretty as her mother.”
He opened another package. “Ah, yes, Catherine’s youngest daughter, Ann. She was as pretty as her mother.” When the scent of flowers and wood smoke wafted around him, he smiled but he didn’t turn.
He finished unloading the box. There was a photo of Catherine’s latest descendants, Lord and Lady Kingsclere. There was a look of Catherine about the eyes of Lord Kingsclere. His mother was named Ann.
The scent grew stronger, and even when he heard the rustle of Ann’s skirt, he didn’t turn.
When the box was empty, he was careful not to look up abruptly. He cleared away the trash, tossed it into the big master bedroom, and closed the door.
There was one more package to unwrap. It was covered with newspaper and tied with string, and was propped against the fireplace. Last night Gladys had made a production of telling her story, then unveiling what she’d found. It was a two-foot-by-three-foot reproduction of the portrait of Catherine. One of the women who’d worked in the gift shop said that years before they’d sold them, but they were too big to carry on a plane so they’d quit stocking them.
With laughter, Gladys recounted how she’d told the woman her American boss had fallen in love with the ghost of a woman who was Lady Catherine’s first cousin. She said the portrait was a gift to Ann Stuart’s ghost from her boss. The woman, who’d worked there for thirty-odd years, said that Gladys’s story was, of course, poppycock, but that few people knew Lady Catherine had a first cousin named Ann Stuart. She looked at Gladys with narrowed eyes. “How did Ann die?” “Suicide, poor dear,” Gladys said. “Where did Ann live?” the woman asked. “Priory House in Margate, Bucks.” Gladys said her love-besotted American boss had bought the house. The woman lifted an eyebrow and said, “Wait right here.” Fifteen minutes later she’d returned with the big portrait printed on cardboard, and she’d charged Gladys the original price of two pounds. To say thanks, Gladys bought an expensive, huge, gilded, wooden frame she’d had trouble getting on the train back to London. With a flare for storytelling, Gladys told them that on the train she’d looked through the books and seen that the woman who had found the picture for her was Lord Kingsclere’s mother, Lady Ann.
They all laughed hard at the story, even Jace, although he was embarrassed by Gladys’s story of his love for a ghost. He made a mental note to be more careful of what he told her in the future. She saw too much.
After her story, Gladys presented the portrait with the fanfare worthy of a circus act.
After Jace saw it, he called room service and ordered champagne.
Now, as slowly as he could manage to do it, he cut the strings and unwrapped the package. Catherine stared back at him, slightly smiling, a woman of great beauty. She was sitting on a chair so her tiny waistline could be seen. The date of the portrait was 1879, the year after Ann died, and Jace thought he could see a hint of sadness behind Catherine’s eyes. A nail was in the wall over the fireplace, so he lifted the portrait and hung it there.
Jace stepped back slowly and didn’t stop until he was at the far side of the room, the bed on his right and the wardrobe on his left. As he knew she was, Ann was standing to the left of the fireplace and staring up at the portrait.
Jace stood still, afraid to even breathe, as he looked at her. She wasn’t as transparent as she had been when he’d seen her in the garden. He could still see through her, but there was now more substance. She was looking up at the portrait, her face turned away from him, but he admired her figure, tall and shapely, with thick hair that he’d like to touch.
When she turned to him, he was smiling, pleased with himself at what he’d done. All the work and expense of making the room look like it once did had paid off. She was here, and now he would find out about Stacy.
He was pleased with himself to the point of smugness, so when she turned it took him a moment to register that she was angry. She looked as though she’d been crying, but now what he saw on her pretty face was old-fashioned rage.
When she took a step toward him, Jace would have backed up, but he was already against the wall and couldn’t go anywhere.
“Did you think I needed to be reminded of what was taken from me?” she said loudly and clearly as she came closer to him. “Do you think this existence isn’t bad enough that you had to make it worse?”
He was pressed against the wall, a ghost was shouting at him, and every horror story Jace had ever heard was running through his head. In another second her ghostly body would reach his. In two seconds, would he be alive?
“Leave me alone,” she said when her face was nose to nose with his. Since he was taller than she was, that meant her feet weren’t touching the ground.
As Jace opened his mouth to defend himself, she ran through him, then through the wall behind him. She took his breath with her.
He stood there gasping for air, but none would reach his lungs. A minute passed but no air. Clutching his throat, he could feel himself growing weak. Had she killed him? He fell against the bed and in the next second his breath came back to him. He lay there, panting, his vision blurred, his senses dizzy. When the room stopped spinning, he looked at the portrait of Catherine. “That went well, didn’t it?”
After a few moments, he collapsed back onto the bed. Now what did he do? Yet again, he’d hit a brick wall. Literally. He looked at his watch. “I wonder if the pub’s open. I need a drink.”
6
Jace was sitting on the stool in the Leaping Stag pub, nursing a beer. Beside him sat the young policeman Clive Sefton. George and Emma were behind the bar, filling the orders of the few other people in the pub. Jace had just finished telling them how much he hated the story of Barbara Caswell, Lady Grace. “How could anyone think that woman was a character who should be romanticized?”
“You do know the truth, don’t you?” Emma said. “The whole story is made up.”
“But I thought it was a true story,” Jace said.
She lowered her voice. “Don’t tell the tourists. Lady Grace gets us in every haunted England book written.”
“It all started with a book about ghosts,” George said while filling a big glass full of stout.
Emma leaned toward Jace. “In the thirties someone wrote a book about the ghosts of England and said that Priory House was haunted by the spirit of an aristocratic lady who used to slip out at night and rob people. That’s all there was to it. In
1946, some writer made up the rest of the story and passed it off as true. Did you see the movie?”
“I didn’t have time,” Jace said.
“We heard you were in London,” Emma said, glancing at her husband over her shoulder. “So what was London like?” she asked loudly, and George shook his head.
“Same as always,” Jace said, then waited for Emma to ask him about making a room in his house look like a set for a Victorian play. When she said nothing, Jace hoped that he’d at last been able to keep one secret. “I don’t want to write what someone else has. Are you sure there haven’t been any other mysteries in this village?”
Clive looked down at his beer. “There was one.”
Emma and George groaned.
“Not again,” Emma said. “Don’t get him started. It’s Clive’s favorite topic, and he’s argued about it until we’re all sick of it. It was suicide, pure and simple.”
Jace took a breath and tried to keep himself calm. “Suicide?”
“Yes!” Emma said, looking pointedly at Clive. “Suicide.”
“But you don’t think it was?” Jace said, gripping his beer so the shaking of his hand wouldn’t show.
“I think…” Clive began slowly.
Emma started washing glasses. “About three years ago, a young woman—”
“A real beauty,” George interjected.
“Yes,” Emma said, “a beautiful young woman committed suicide in a room upstairs. She’d been drinking and crying and she stopped in here and asked if we had a room for rent.”
“Still had a room for rent,” Clive said.
“I don’t know if that’s what she said. I know I said that right after we found her body, but later I wasn’t sure. It was noisy in here and I may have misheard her.”
“But you found her the next day,” Jace said, his voice soft as he tried to keep it steady.
“Yes. Poor thing. She’d taken most of a bottle of sleeping pills. I called George and he looked at her through the chain lock on the door, then he called Clive—who, I might add, was brand new on the force and didn’t know anything.”
“Not that he does now,” George said, but Clive didn’t smile.
“But you think it was murder,” Jace said to Clive, but the young policeman said nothing.
“Go on, tell him,” Emma said, but Clive was silent.
George took Jace’s empty glass and gave him another beer. “Her sister and her mother came from the States and—”
“Her mother?!” Jace asked, then had to cover himself. “That must have been hard for her to have seen.” He took a deep drink of his beer.
“It was,” Emma said. “The two women were beside themselves. They kept saying that they knew it was going to happen sooner or later.”
“It seems she was a real nut case,” George said. “Her mother showed us a stack of letters from psychiatrists about the girl. She’d tried to kill herself before.”
“And her mother showed up with these papers?” Jace asked. “You’d think that she would have been too distraught by news of her daughter’s death to think of getting papers out to prove that the girl was crazy.”
Clive looked at Jace with his eyes wide. “That’s just what I thought. It was as though those two women wanted to prove to us that she was insane. The mother asked that it not be put in the paper that she’d been there. If those women hadn’t been in the States when it happened…”
“What?” Jace asked.
“I would have thought they did it.”
Emma threw up her hands and George snorted.
“Tell him why you think she didn’t commit suicide,” Emma said. “Go on, tell him.”
“She tripped on the stairs,” Clive muttered.
“What?” Jace asked.
“She tripped on the stairs,” Emma said loudly, then lowered her voice. “Clive, I’ve told you a thousand times. She was drunk. I smelled it on her breath. She was drunk and when she went up the stairs, she tripped. Simple.”
Jace was looking at Clive. “What does tripping on the stairs have to do with murder?”
Clive lifted his head, turned on the bar stool, and faced Jace. When he spoke, there was energy in his voice. “You see—”
“He’s off and running,” George said.
Jace tried to keep the annoyance off his face and out of his voice. “Let’s get a table,” he said and they took their beers to a booth in a far corner. “I think this might be the case I’m looking for,” Jace said, “so I want to know everything. You wouldn’t want to start at the beginning, would you?”
“I’ll bore you.”
“I swear that you won’t.”
“Okay,” Clive said, “but I warn you that all of this is based on a feeling I have and nothing else. The evidence was that a young American woman, named Stacy Evans, had a fight with her boyfriend, she stopped at a pub, asked if they had a room, then went upstairs and took a bottle of sleeping pills. Her family was called and her mother and sister flew in right away and presented papers as proof that the girl had been a problem since she was a kid. Her mother died when she was young and it very nearly sent her over the edge.”
“Her mother died? So who showed up here?”
“Her stepmother, but she said she’d been Stacy’s mother since she was a child so she loved her.” Clive looked down at his beer.
“But you didn’t believe her.”
“No, I didn’t. I told the superintendent that I didn’t, but he said I’d been reading too many fairy tales about wicked stepmothers. There were no signs of foul play, but then there was only one door into the room and it was locked from the inside. She had a purse full of money, and she was wearing diamond earrings. Nothing was stolen, and there was no evidence of recent sexual activity.”
Jace had to put his beer mug up to his face to hide his expression. It didn’t matter, of course, but he was glad that Stacy hadn’t been unfaithful to him.
“It was an open and shut case,” Clive said. “A nutcase offs herself. The end.”
Jace winced at the young man’s crudeness. “But she tripped on the stairs.”
“Yes,” Clive said. “You see, this pub used to be a real bad place. When I was a kid…” He smiled. “Better not tell you about what I was like when I was a kid. You’ve heard of the vicar and the way he helps kids like me?”
“Actually, I have,” Jace said. “You were one of his triumphs?”
“I was one of his harder cases. I grew up with…” Clive waved his hand. “My life story doesn’t matter except to say that I spent many a wasted hour here getting into trouble. You wouldn’t think that a quiet little village like Margate could have such an evil place, but it did. Gambling in the back room, girls upstairs, drugs sold in the loo. If you wanted it, you could get it here.”
Jace was beginning to understand. “The stairs were changed.”
“Yeah. When the old man that owned this place died, the Carews bought it and tore it apart. They pulled out the back wall and drove a JCB in here.”
“A backhoe?” Jace asked.
“Probably the same thing. They tore out all the old stuff.” Clive gave a little smile. “They burned a lot of it and by then I was trying to reform, but I stood around with the other kids and breathed deeply of that smoke.”
Jace made himself smile at the story, but he wanted Clive to continue about Stacy. “Everything was changed?”
“Everything. Due to my wasted youth—fun but wasted—I knew the place well, but after Emma and George redid it, I didn’t recognize it. After I became a cop, I had to go up those stairs several times and I always tripped in the same place. The stairs are where they used to be, but now there’s a funny little curve in them. Emma had it built that way so she could put in that fancy jar. See it?”
Jace gave a cursory glance at the big brass vase on the stair landing, then looked back at Clive. “What you’re saying is that you think this young woman…what was her name?”
“Stacy Evans.”
“Yo
u think that Miss Evans had been in this pub so many times that she was familiar enough with it that she tripped on the new stairs?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
“But even if that was true, why would that make murder more likely than suicide? Maybe she met an old boyfriend here in Margate, had a fight with him, then took her own life because of it.”
“That’s what everyone said happened.”
“Then why don’t you believe it?”
“You’ll laugh at me.”
“No, I won’t.”
“She didn’t look unhappy. Does that make any sense? I was in a school—at least that’s what they called it, but it was really a prison for kids—so I saw some attempts at suicide. There was a point when I played with it myself. There’s a look about people who want to off themselves that’s like no other. It’s around the eyes and…”
“Miss Evans didn’t look like that?”
“Naw, if anything, I’d say she looked happy. She was lying there on the bed with a little smile on her face. Man! She was beautiful. I just couldn’t believe that that woman had anything to be unhappy about. Her father was rich, she was…what’s that you Yanks say about dropping dead?”
“Stacy Evans was drop-dead gorgeous,” Jace said quietly, making Clive look at him.
“Yeah, she was.”
“And she died with a smile on her face. Maybe she was smiling because she was at last going to get out of her problems. Didn’t you say she was engaged to be married?”
“No,” Clive said quietly, staring at Jace. “I didn’t say that. Nobody did.”
“I guess I assumed it. Was she supposed to be married?”
Clive was looking at Jace hard. “You’re him, aren’t you? Stacy had your picture in her wallet. I used to look at it and wonder why you didn’t come over and see about her.”
Jace took a moment to make a decision. Should he try to lie his way out of this? No. “I wasn’t told of her death until her body was already back in the States,” Jace said. “Will you—”
“Tell on you? No. I have so many secrets about the people in this town that you wouldn’t believe it. See that little old man over there? When he was nineteen, he killed three men in a barroom fight. He spent most of his life in jail. Now he grows peonies. See that woman? Oh, well, you get the picture. So did you buy that huge place, Priory House, just to find out what happened to Stacy? I guess I should call her ‘Miss Evans,’ but I spent so much time on her case that I feel as though I know her. What was she like?”