Jace took a long drink of his beer. “She was funny and smart and loved marshmallows. She liked them toasted, plain, in chocolate, however she could figure out a way to use them. She had a photographic memory. She was very kind and I was mad about her. When she died I wanted to die with her. She wasn’t crazy and I think she was murdered.”
Clive looked at Jace for a while and thought about what he’d said. He lowered his voice. “Who else knows who you are and why you’re here?”
“Only you know and I didn’t mean for you to find out.”
“I won’t give you away. If someone did kill Stacy, then they might come after you.”
“Do you have any suspicions of who did it?”
“None whatever. Not a clue.” Clive was talking so low that Jace could hardly hear him. “I showed her photo around for a year, asking questions anywhere I went, but no one admitted seeing her. I had to ask questions in secret because if the superintendent found out about it, he would have tossed me out. He didn’t want to have anything to do with me in the first place because of my past here in Margate, but—”
“Why didn’t you go somewhere else? Is your family here?”
“Don’t have one. Orphaned young, passed around. I did some damage here when I was a kid and I wanted to repay it, so I came back here to work,” Clive said.
“You wanted to show the people who’d said you’d never amount to much that you could achieve something.”
“Exactly,” Clive said, smiling. “Exactly.”
“But you couldn’t show anybody anything about Stacy if you were caught disobeying an order, could you?”
“No. So what have you found out?”
“Nothing,” Jace said, then decided to take a chance. He really wanted someone to talk to about what had been going on in his life lately. “I’ve been trying to get Ann Stuart to tell me something, but she says she hates me, so I don’t know where to go from here.”
“Ann Stuart? I don’t believe I know her. She an American?”
“Ann Stuart is the ghost in Priory House.”
Clive’s expression changed little, but then he’d had a lot of practice pretending to believe preposterous stories. “Rides about the hall on her horse, does she?”
“Sorry I said anything,” Jace said, but he knew it was too late. “To answer your question, I haven’t found out anything that isn’t in the newspapers. I’ve had to deal with Mrs. Browne and her two snooping friends and—”
“So what’s your ghost look like?” Clive asked, smirking. “Rotting clothes? Missing eyeballs, that sort of thing?”
Jace signaled George that he wanted his bill so he could leave. “I trust, Constable Sefton, that you’ll keep what we discussed to yourself.”
“Sure,” Clive said, still smiling. “I’ll keep everything—if you know what I mean—to myself.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Jace said as he left the pub.
7
The next morning Jace awoke before daylight and lay there thinking about what he’d learned so far. He was elated that Clive also believed Stacy had been murdered, but Jace was no closer to finding out who or why than he had been. He wished he hadn’t told Clive about Ann. She was Jace’s secret and he shouldn’t have said anything.
He got up, dressed, and tried to figure out where to go next.
Mrs. Browne was in her kitchen and she was in a snit. “I never saw such a mess,” she was saying. “Dirty dishes everywhere when I came in and my larder emptied. You must’ve had a party with twenty people here.”
It was obvious she was trying to get information out of him. “We had an orgy,” he said seriously. “Naked Americans running everywhere.”
“Humph!” she said, then put a platter of bacon, eggs, tomatoes, toast, and mushrooms before him. “If you were naked you’d’ve got wallpaper paste on you. What did you do to that lovely room upstairs?”
Another request for information. “You mean the room the last owners used to store boxes? That lovely room?”
“They had no taste. Horrible people. I was glad when she scared them away.”
“She who?”
“The ghost, of course,” she snapped. “The one you saw in the garden.”
“Ah, that one. Big woman? Flaming red hair? I didn’t want to tell you this, Mrs. B, but she was riding a huge black horse and coming right at you. She doesn’t have any reason to be angry at you, does she?”
“No, of course not,” she said, but her face went pale, then turned red as she realized he was teasing her. “Go on, get out of here. I have work to do.”
Smiling, Jace went upstairs, got his laptop, and took it outside to sit in the shade of a rose-covered arbor. He pulled up his word processor, started an outline, and began to write down all that he knew about Stacy.
When he had two pages of facts, he saw that there were some things that puzzled him. Stacy’s sister and stepmother had shown the English police a stack of papers from psychiatrists saying Stacy had serious “problems.” The only problem he knew she’d had was an inability to sleep for more than three hours at a time. But as soon as Stacy had moved in with Jace and he’d begun blocking her family from getting to her, the sleep problems had stopped. Before Jace stepped in, her sister would call her at 3:00 a.m. She was up with her kids, so she called Stacy for “support.” “True sisters support each other,” Regina would say. Of course, Stacy would never think of calling anyone at 3:00 a.m. Jace began unplugging the phone at night. His family had his cell number, but no one in Stacy’s family had it.
Up until the day of Stacy’s death he would have sworn that there were no secrets between them, but he’d found out that she had spent years in therapy. Considering that her mother had died when Stacy was young and that her father hadn’t bothered to make time for her, therapy was understandable. But how had she been labeled as “troubled”?
He closed his eyes for a moment. He was being brainwashed by Regina’s family’s lies. He and Stacy had been in love. They’d told each other everything.
But they hadn’t. She hadn’t told him about knowing of Margate and when she’d been there before.
Yet again, it came to him that the ghost of Ann Stuart would know if Stacy had visited the house. She saw everything, but she wasn’t speaking to him, and he hadn’t felt her presence all day.
After lunch (Jamie Oliver’s stuffed chicken breast), Jace wandered about the chintz room and idly pushed on every panel. The lady highwayman story had been a lie, but maybe it was based on some fact. Maybe the hidden staircase was real, and maybe if he found it, he’d find out something about Ann, which would lead him to—
A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts. Frowning, he opened the door to see pretty little Daisy standing there, her face flushed, as though she’d run up the stairs. She was looking over her shoulder like she expected Mrs. Browne to jump out from behind the cabinets. Not now and not this, Jace thought, and opened his mouth to begin a lecture on her age and his.
Daisy thrust a tightly rolled newspaper at him. “I think you should see this, sir.”
“What is it?”
She looked over her shoulder again, then took a step closer to him. Jace held his stance in front of the door. He wasn’t about to let her inside the room.
“It’s the village paper,” she whispered, holding it out to him. It was rolled into a tight little tube and seemed to have something clear and gelatinous on it. “Sorry about the egg,” Daisy said, “but I pulled it from Mrs. B’s rubbish bin. Don’t let her see that you have it and you wouldn’t tell her I gave it to you, would you?”
Jace frowned harder. This fear of the housekeeper had to stop! “No, I won’t tell her,” he said in a normal voice, not a whisper. “But not because I’m afraid to but because you asked me to. Truthfully, I think—” He broke off because Daisy heard a sound from downstairs and took off running down the hall.
Sighing at the absurdity of it all, Jace took the newspaper into the room and closed the door. His frown turne
d to disbelief when he saw the headline. Smack in the middle of the front page was a photo of him that had been taken many years before when he was in college. He’d been drinking with his fraternity brothers and singing every raunchy song they could come up with. One of the guys had been snapping pictures. Jace hadn’t seen the photo in years, but there it was, taking up half of the upper section of the paper. His hair was standing on end, his shirt was undone, and he had his arms around two of his frat brothers while holding two bottles of beer. He looked like a poorly groomed alcoholic. IS THIS WHAT WE WANT IN MARGATE? the headline read.
Jace stumbled back until his knees hit a chair. He sat down and began to read.
As everyone in Margate knows by now, Priory House has been purchased again. But this time the venerable old house hasn’t been bought by a family that wants a home here. It’s been bought by a rich American who, in just a few days, has earned himself quite a reputation around town. He’s in the pubs every night and it’s reported that he even drinks Mr. Hatch’s brews. And he’s already taken one mysterious trip to London. When asked about his trip, he refused to tell why he went, but we residents of Margate didn’t have to wait long before we found out. It seems that he went to London to buy furniture and accessories so he could tart up the notorious chintz room of Priory House into a bad reproduction of a Victorian movie set. Is this the prelude to opening the house to the public as some House of Ghostly Horror?
What all of us in Margate want to know is what Mr. Montgomery is up to.
This reporter, through diligent searching, has found out that the Montgomery family’s wealth goes back centuries. They have mansions all over the world. Mr. Jace Montgomery has purchased a house with the reputation as one of the most haunted in England. And he has bragged to anyone who will listen that he saw the ghost of Lady Grace in the daylight in the garden.
Does he plan to exploit the murdering ghost of Priory House? Will our village fête be replaced with re-creations that glorify Lady Grace and the innocent people she killed? Will quiet, beautiful Margate be changed into a town of horror? Will plastic ghouls be hanging from the lovely old stone windows of that magnificent house? Will Mr. Montgomery put fake movie blood on the stones? Is this what we want for our town?
Is this very rich American here to turn magnificent, history-laden Priory House into a tourist attraction? Will this bored American be the end of our happy and comfortable village? Are we ready for tourists parked on our lawns?
Are we ready for the charlatans, the soothsayers, the devil-worshipers that will show up here in our lovely village?
What do you think?
For a full ten minutes, all Jace could do was stare at the newspaper type. The absurdity of what had been written about him made his head spin. Someone had taken a few truths and twisted them into this ridiculous piece of gossip. No, it was stronger than gossip. It was malicious.
With the newspaper in hand, he went downstairs then out to the garage. He wasn’t surprised to see Mick standing nearby with his car keys ready.
“Left by the library,” Mick said as Jace took the keys from him. “Three houses down on the right.”
Jace was so angry that he was off Priory House property before he realized that Mick had been telling him where the newspaper office was. When he reached the center of the village, he stopped at a corner and a man tapped on his window. Jace lowered it.
“I’d make an excellent tour guide,” the man said. “I used to work at Priory House until old Mr. Hatch fired me. I could tell people all about Lady Grace on her horse ridin’ up the stairs at night. I can be as scary as you want.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Jace said. “I have no intention of making my home into a tourist attraction.”
“Well, you wouldn’t need to, would you?” the man said, his face turning red with anger. “You’re already rich, so what do you care about the rest of us that’s just tryin’ to make a livin’?”
Jace put the window back up and when someone else tapped on the glass on the other side of the car, he didn’t answer. At the library, he turned left and parked in front of an old house that had a small brass sign that said MARGATE POST.
Jace ignored the two people hurrying toward him as he went down the flagstone path in four long strides. He didn’t bother to knock, but threw open the door. Inside was a room that was furnished like a living room, with a TV against one wall. On the long wall was a window with a desk and computer beneath it.
“You must be Mr. Montgomery,” said a short, round, older man just entering the room. “Nigh said I should expect you. She said to send you on down to her.”
Jace was confused as to what the man was talking about. He held up the paper, his face furious. “Did you write this about me?”
“Good heavens, no,” the man said, walking toward the computer. “I’m more into politics and telling the government how it should run itself. I have no interest in local scandals.” He picked up a handful of mail and began to go through it. “No, who you want is Nigh.”
“Nigh?” Jace asked.
“N. A. Smythe, the byline,” the man said. “But then, with a name like Nightingale, she’s wise to abbreviate it.”
“Stuart,” Jace said under his breath.
The man had been acting as though he wasn’t much interested in Jace, but he cocked his head in speculation. “Ann Nightingale Stuart?” he asked in that way the English have of making every sentence a question. “You have been doing some research, haven’t you? Are you really going to turn Priory House into a tourist attraction? We could use the revenue in the village.”
“No, I’m not—” Jace began, but then shut his mouth. This man was a reporter. “What I do with my house is my business. Where is the woman who wrote this libel about me?”
The man lifted his eyebrows. “Libel? Oh dear, I hope you don’t sue us. If you did, as you can see, you wouldn’t get much.” He waved his hand about the room. “It’s just a local paper and not worth much. I’m Ralph Barker, editor, such as it is. I’d be happy to hear your side of the story.”
“I bet you would,” Jace said. “But the only side you’re likely to hear is from my lawyer.”
“Oh, my, you Yanks and your lawsuits.”
Jace narrowed his eyes at the man. “I want to know where this woman is. I’d like to speak to her.”
“You don’t have a gun, do you?” When he saw the look on Jace’s face, he gave a half smile. “Just having you on. Go back the way you came, past the gate to your house, first house on your left. Nigh should be up by now. Hope you don’t catch her in her dressing gown. You’d cause even more scandal, and you don’t need that right now.”
“More scandal?” Jace said through clenched teeth. “I wasn’t aware I had caused any scandal.”
“And that’s what you should tell Nigh. I’ll keep next week’s Post open for you. If you have any recent photos of yourself—”
Jace didn’t hear the rest because he slammed the door and got back into his car. He knew he broke the speed limit as he drove toward the house at the end of his property, but as far as he could tell, the English paid no attention to speed limits.
When he came to a small, two-story stone house in the corner of the two roads that were the boundary of his property, he halted so quickly he nearly went through the windshield. There was a short, curved wall with a gate and he flung it open. A blue door was inside a little pointed-roof porch and he pounded on the door.
“It’s open,” came a woman’s voice.
The door hit the wall as he flung it back and strode into a small sitting room. In front of him was a fireplace, to the left a deep window enclosure that contained a desk and a laptop computer. A young, pretty woman with dark hair and dark eyes sat on the desk chair. There was intelligence in her eyes, and something else that he wasn’t sure of. If he had to guess, he would have said that she’d seen a lot of things that she hadn’t wanted to see.
Jace held up the newspaper. “Every word of this is a lie,” he said. H
e was so angry he could hardly speak.
“Is it? From what I heard, everything I wrote is verifiable.”
For a moment Jace could only blink at her. “Everything is twisted and distorted.”
She reached for a stenographer’s notebook and pen. “So sit down and tell me the truth. I promise to publish your side of the truth this time.”
“There is only one side of the truth. What you wrote is nothing but lies.”
She looked at him for a moment, then uncurled herself from her chair. “How about a cuppa?” She turned her back on him with all the confidence of a woman who was used to men doing what she asked them to.
In spite of himself, Jace followed her through the doorway, then down three steps into the kitchen. Against one wall were old cabinets and open shelves filled with mismatched dishes and a thousand notes shoved in between. A narrow table was against the other wall and a couple of doors in the corner. When she motioned to the table, he sat down, the newspaper in front of him, his old photo staring up at him. “Where did you get that?” he asked softly.
“Internet. The Big Brother of the modern world. It took a while but I found it. Your family is very secretive about what it owns and who’s in it.”
Jace didn’t answer that. “I have people asking me for jobs.”
“I’ll print a retraction so the lovely people will forget what I questioned.”
She had her back to him, standing at the sink filling the kettle. She had on narrow black trousers that ended midcalf and a long-sleeved, knit black sweater. She wasn’t very tall, but she was as thin as a model. When he glanced up he saw that she was watching him in the reflection in the window.