A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [32]
He looked at me sideways, evaluating the profound distaste in my voice.
"And you call her a friend?"
I had to smile. "Yes, I suppose I do. Not that she expected me to do anything with it— she made it quite clear that she did not mind if I sat on it. It's waited almost nineteen hundred years, after all. What's another fifty? She just wanted me to appreciate it and to keep it safe. That in and of itself seems enough of a problem, at the moment," I added to myself, but he picked it up immediately.
"So you think that your manuscript might be at the bottom of it after all? That someone is trying to get his hands on it?"
"I can easily envisage any number of people who might want to possess such a thing, but at this point, Chief Inspector Lestrade, I am keeping a very open mind," I said firmly. That kept him silent until we entered the village and asked directions of a woman pushing a pram.
NINE
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The house to which we were eventually directed was a small two-storey brick building with a front garden composed of weeds and unpruned roses, a broken front step, and sagging lace curtains at the windows. The bell seemed not to work, but loud knocks brought a shuffling in the hallway and an eye under the door chain.
"Who is that?" The accents were those of Miss Ruskin, but the voice was weak and sounded old.
"Pardon me, I'm looking for Miss Erica Ruskin."
"There's been no Miss Erica Ruskin for nearly forty years, young man. What do you want?"
Lestrade was not daunted.
"I am Chief Inspector Lestrade from Scotland Yard. I'd like to speak with the sister of Miss Dorothy Ruskin, and I was given this address."
Silence fell. The faded blue eye travelled over us, and then the gap narrowed, the chain was slipped, and the door opened.
Dorothy Ruskin had been short, but she would have towered above her sister in both stature and personality. This woman barely cleared five feet, and though she had her sister's erect spine, there was none of her authority and purpose. For an instant, the ghost of Dorothy Ruskin looked at me from the eyelids and nose before me; then it faded and there was only a stranger.
"I am Mrs Erica Rogers, Chief Inspector. Dorothy's sister. Is she in some sort of trouble?"
"May we come in, Mrs Rogers? This is Miss Russell, my assistant." We had agreed that I would take notes and use my eyes, as his "assistant."
"Come in?" She examined us suspiciously head to toe, and I smothered an impulse to check my buttons and pat my hairpins. However, we apparently met her standards and were admitted. "I suppose you can come in. In there, the first door."
The door opened into a small, crowded sitting room, thick with gewgaws and whatnots, sepia photographs, reproductions of popular trite Victorian paintings, porcelain figurines, and souvenirs of Brighton and Blackpool. The air was musty and stale, dim despite the window, and the once good Chinese carpet was worn thin and colourless. There was little dust, and the windows were clean, and it could not have been further from the dirty, mad, and infinitely appealing dwelling inhabited by the sister in distant Palestine.
Mrs Rogers followed us into the room and retrieved a knitting project from one of the pair of heavy leather armchairs, their arms and headrests draped incongruously with delicate lace antimacassers, that occupied either side of the tiny fireplace. She waved Lestrade into the other chair, then looked somewhat helplessly about, as if expecting a third armchair to materialise. I solved her dilemma by moving to a hard wooden stool that sat next to the window, out of her line of sight if she faced Lestrade, and took out my notebook with an air of efficiency. I uncapped my pen and prepared to take my unintelligible notes,