A Fatal Winter (32 page)

And here came Lester and Felberta, Lester none the worse for his own outing in the garden except for a hectic flush of red across the cheekbones. Felberta wore another of her confections that seemed only to lack a salad dressing, and a necklace like a string of eyeballs. The flowery pattern of her blouse was an odd choice for the dead of winter—too youthful and fussy by half. Still, Max supposed the colors might be meant to cheer her up. Surely, someone or something needed to.

“How I shall miss Leticia and her spreadsheet-like analyses of the bloodstock lineage of this or that Great and Noble Family,” she was saying as she entered.

“And Oscar! How I shall miss Oscar,” said her husband. “He was so full of…”

“Life. Yes,” said Gwynyth, looking up. Max may have imagined it, but it seemed to be a warning movement.

“Shit. He was so full of shit.”

“I see you’ve heard about his will,” said Gwynyth.

“He left us a pittance, considering what there was to go around.”

“You’re telling me?” But she no longer looked as perturbed as she had been. Had Randolph been making reassurances on that score?

“It makes it harder to mourn him, knowing how he really felt,” said Lester.

“Speak for yourself,” said Gwynyth. “He was, after all, the father of my children.”

Max stole a look at her. This was certainly a new tune she was singing now.

Lamorna clumped in and sat down heavily next to him. She wore a
Why bother?
sort of frock that may have been, and probably was, from the last-chance bin at Oxfam. Over it she wore a moose-colored sweater that fell in droopy folds to a puddle at the top of her thighs.

She leaned in to him with an urgent whisper. “There is something I just remembered, passing by Lady B’s room.” She looked around, then lowered her voice still more. “On the day of the murder, I heard her talking loudly with Cilla in her room.
Quarreling
. It must have been just before she died.”

“Quarreling about what?”

“I was too far down the hall to tell what it was about. But what I want to know is, could it have brought on her attack?” This was said with more than a little hopeful relish. Max thought this was the kind of thing Lamorna might say, to create a bit of drama out of an ordinary event, not that she had a particular desire to chuck Cilla into it. Her eyes were gaunt, from worry or lack of sleep or both.

“I doubt it, Lamorna. Apparently your grandmother was carrying this time bomb inside her that could go off at any time, for any reason.”

Max noticed Lester and Felberta, who had taken seats on the opposite side of the wide table, were closely watching the conversation. Hurriedly, in case they could read lips, he changed the subject, suggesting a few hymns for the service for Oscar and Leticia.

Amanda drifted in in her ethereal way and sat to Max’s left with a shy smile, her twin Alec following. Despite the usual sibling rivalries, the pair seemed nearly inseparable. Alec, after a moment’s hesitation, moved to sit at the head of the table in what likely had been Oscar’s chair. Max thought it an interesting choice.

Simon had arrived, and sat near Lester and Felberta. Jocasta was not with him.

It was Amanda who asked, “Where’s Jocasta?”

“She’s upstairs Googling herself on my computer,” said Alec. “Seriously: It’s pathetic. She hasn’t had a fresh mention in the news in decades. The murder has put her in the spotlight for the first time in ages, but in a way that has nothing to do with her acting.”

Simon put his napkin on the table and said, “I’ll go find her.”

Watching Simon’s back as he loped acrobatically up the stairs, Lester said, “I suppose it’s too much to hope she’s packed up and left.”

“None of us are allowed to do that, as you well know, per that dandyish inspector. Perhaps she’s fallen off the ledge and into the sea, though?” offered Felberta hopefully.

“Really. That is rather unkind, don’t you feel?” said Cilla. “She can’t help being … well…”

“Is ‘stupid’ the word you’re reaching for?” asked Felberta.

Lamorna, her face puckered with disapproval at the large scotch Lester held in his hand, pointedly asked Milo for her
usual
lemon squash.

The twins sat whispering past their mother as if she weren’t there, shutting out the adult world in favor of their own dark little Narnia. Max could hardly blame them but found something rather … creepy, he decided, in their determined isolation from the others. The broken rays of the stained glass caught the threesome’s pale hair and turned it into a pastel riot of color.

“This place is always freezing. I hate it. I shall live in Italy when I’m grown,” Max overheard Amanda say. “Somewhere where it’s always warm.”

“Spoken like a true product of the current education system, a product with a shaky grasp on geography,” said Alec, reverting to his “superior older brother” role.

“What do you mean?”

“Italy has snow. Much of it is covered by mountains.”

Amanda gave him a mutinous look.

“You know what I meant. I want to go somewhere where we don’t get this ghastly freaking weather.”

Max stole a glance at the seat at the other head of the table, presumably reserved for Leticia. It was of course empty and likely would remain so, with no one willing to usurp the throne, at least not so blatantly.

“Who outranked whom?” Max idly wondered aloud. “Leticia with her Baynards or Oscar and the Footrustles?”

“Oh, don’t get them started or they’ll pull out the family trees and squabble all night,” Alec said. “Both families are frightfully old, you know. My aunt Leticia only lost out because the lot she married into lost the family fortune and had to sell up. We at least get to live here still. That is, if we want. Which most of us don’t.”

“How I have longed for a real English Christmas dinner,” Felberta could be heard saying. “I wonder if Doris might serve goose?”

“All this Tiny Tim rubbish.” Alec stared down the long table from his throne. “First Jocasta and Simon, and now you. There never has been goose served before for Christmas. I don’t see why Cook would start now.”

Doris had come from the kitchen to serve, replacing Milo. The transition was so smooth it was barely noticeable. The couple was evidently used to working in tandem.

“At least we’re not getting the usual requests for ghost stories,” said Amanda.

Alec said to Max: “You’ve come to the right place. This castle
does
have ghosts. It needs an exorcist.”

“A deliverance minister, you mean,” said Max. He tasted the soup Doris had ladled into his bowl, a soup made of buttery potatoes flavored with ginger. It was delicious: Doris really deserved a five-star rating.

“You’re not serious,” said Alec.

“Of course I am. Every diocese has one. Sometimes people think their homes are haunted, so they call the Church for help.”

“And do they? I mean, are they able to help?”

“Quite often,” replied Max. “The question of course is whether the visit by the deliverance minister had a placebo effect. Or whether the priest was able to help some troubled soul find rest at last.”

Alec stared at him for a moment and then said, “I don’t believe in God.”

Max quietly put down his spoon. He was reminded of the rabbi who had once said in reply to this claim, “What makes you think God cares?” Reams had been written on this subject, but in the end it came down to the rabbi’s simple question, and man’s hubris in questioning the existence of a power higher—and smarter—than himself.

Max was used to this sort of thing from young people like Alec. It was, after all, their job at that age to challenge the status quo. He was somehow not too surprised when Lester joined in the discussion, adding his none-too-original views, which mirrored Alec’s.

Many people on first seeing a clerical collar felt the need to draw a line in the sand, offering the many, many reasons for their beliefs (or lack thereof). Lester seemed to fall into the category of “nonbeliever who doth protest too much.” If Max had wanted to, he felt he could have converted the man on the spot, but people made their own peace with the divine, each in their own way.

Max smiled and said, “All religions offer a template for a moral code for mankind. Sometimes, they offer more. It is up to the individual to believe, or not, as they choose. God simply waits for us to catch up.”

“I believe in karma,” said Amanda. She said it with such conviction he wondered if the current events in the castle weren’t uppermost in her mind.

“Hinduism is a wise religion,” said Max. “As well as being an extremely ancient one.”

“Not everyone would call it a religion,” said Amanda. And she launched into a comparison of spiritual traditions and organized religions, with an emphasis on the theories of reincarnation. She was fourteen, he marveled, and younger only by minutes than her brother. She seemed much the more mature of the two, despite Alec’s evident cleverness. As she spoke, he watched her face, its planes fine and sharp as cut glass. It was a mirror for her mother’s, but rounded where her mother’s was sharply defined.

Alec said, “I think reincarnation would be cool.”

Max started to reply, calling Alec by his first name. “But I’m forgetting,” said Max. “You are Lord Footrustle now, aren’t you?”

Alec looked straight ahead to the empty seat at the opposite end of the table, the seat where Leticia should have been.

“I will never get used to that. Please call me Alec.”

Max was relieved, after Alec’s bold choice of sitting in Oscar’s chair, to hear indications of humility and normalcy. Perhaps Alec had felt that Oscar would have wanted him to take charge.

“If you will call me Max,” he replied. “I never got used to being called Father Tudor, even by someone of your generation, and even when I’m old and gray I don’t think I’ll care much for it.” Max took a slice of bread from the silver breadbasket. “You’re not thinking of renouncing the title or anything like that?”

“Are you mad? Titles are a chick magnet.”

At that, his sister made a choking sound as if her soup had stopped in her throat. So much for Amanda’s vaster stores of maturity. But she had been keeping a careful eye on Max, and she now said to him, “I know why you’re here.”

Max thought that certainly put her one step ahead of both his bishop and even himself. He turned to give her his full attention.

“You’re sizing us all up,” she said evenly. “You’re gathering impressions as you weigh our potential as murderers.”

That was so near the mark—spot on, in fact—that Max chose to elide past the moment rather than directly lie to the child.

“It was actually Lamorna who wanted me here.” He glanced at Lamorna, who sat grimly staring across the table at Felberta. Lamorna’s sudden windfall might have been expected to make her happy, but it seemed to be making her anxious. He didn’t suppose Lamorna had had a lot of practice in thinking and acting for herself, and her situation might indeed be anxiety-provoking.

Max tuned back in just in time to hear Lester say, “I need to make friends. You know, business contacts. Maybe I should join Twitter or something.” From somewhere in the room came a discreet snort. It might have come from Alec or Randolph—from any of them.

Just then a voice cried stagily from the stairs. It was a voice designed for cattle drives; for tornadoes and similar grand-scale, noisy calamities.

“I’d be careful if I were you, Lester. Just think of all the enemies you could make.”

CHAPTER 22

Ready for My Close-up

Jocasta, having delivered her opening lines, waltzed slowly down the spiral stone staircase into the Hall, trailing a black chiffon scarf. She was followed by Milo and Simon, who had collected her from somewhere in the castle.

She tottered unsteadily on the style of high platform shoes with which many a more nimble woman had come to grief. Around her shoulders was a cloak with a stiff, stand-up collar, not unlike the Queen’s in
Snow White
, a cloak she held close against the chill. She looked like a child playing dress-up.

Randolph rose to take her hand, kissing it in an exaggerated, courtly fashion.

“Let me help you to your seat, dear cousin,” he said.

Jocasta smiled her
over the rainbow
smile, a fluttery beam of gratitude and whimsical yearning.

“What melancholy!” she cried, looking up at him adoringly. “How do you bear it here, on this lonesome coast? And such tension within, as if the very
ribs
of the house were breathing” (Ruthelle Narwith,
Knives at Midnight
). She rolled the “R” in “ribs” like an opera singer, her voice trilling to a high falsetto that pinged off the high ceiling.

“Whatever are you talking about?” Alec wondered.

“I think you’ll find the line was ‘roof of the house,’” said Simon.

“Hmm?” said Jocasta.

“Oh,” said Alec. “She’s in one of her movies again, isn’t she?” He said this flatly, as if it were a normal occurrence, Max noted. Undoubtedly it was.

Jocasta, if Simon read her right, and he was certain he did, was tonight playing the part of an upper-class woman with a Roedean accent possessed by a mysterious flesh-eating microbe. Jocasta raised one eyebrow now at the interruption to her performance, an eyebrow waxed to a perfect half-moon shape. The price for such glossy perfection, as Simon recalled, had come to something like twenty-five dollars a brow.

Max studied Simon closely, while pretending to be absorbed in buttering a piece of bread. By a trick of the candlelight, Simon appeared to be wearing eyeliner. Very Hollywood, but Max decided overall he’d been blessed with the kind of thick eyelashes most women could only envy. The Valentino-ish touch was at odds with his boyish, all-American appearance.

Jocasta, beneath her cape (which she dropped on the floor for Milo to pick up), was ready to party in a sparkly gold-and-silver top, cut low and worn over a floaty, too-short gray chiffon skirt. Max recalled that she was no doubt dressing from a suitcase full of clothing brought with her for the holidays, an impression confirmed when he heard her say, “I suppose I must get into town soon to buy a mourning costume.”