Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [53]
“This place looks like any minute Keira Knightley is going to draw up to it in a gilded horse-drawn carriage,” Alli said.
She wasn’t far off the mark, Jack thought. The place was fit for a nineteenth-century baron or viscount, but a dead one. The place was lightless and, as they soon discovered, locked up tighter than a duck’s behind.
“Not making sense,” Alli said.
Which was also true, Jack thought, unless Magnussen, having gotten the warning call from Boyer, packed up and flew the coop in the hour or so it had taken them to drive out here. It would have taken them far less time if they hadn’t been slowed down by the dark-colored sedan tailing them. And then, of course, he understood.
“Magnussen’s gone,” he said. “The purpose of the tail was not to see where we were going, but to slow us down. Boyer must have gone to the back of his shop the moment we left and seen the bill of lading out of place.”
“Nevertheless,” Annika said, “it couldn’t hurt to take a look around the grounds.”
They set off in a more or less northeasterly direction, making a full circle of the property. The dull, clammy morning had been swept away by a freshening wind out of the west, but high up the remnants of the morning’s clouds drifted across the sun. They came first to an apple orchard, the orderly rows of gnarled trees looking abandoned and forlorn. Next came a fenced-in section that in the summer would be bursting with rows of pole beans, cabbage, cucumbers, and lettuce, but now lay fallow.
By this time they were behind the manor house, approximately at a forty-five degree angle to its right-hand wing, moving in a counterclockwise direction. Coming over a rise they spotted a finger of water that turned out to be a small lake or perhaps a large pond, it was difficult to tell from their present position. But what surprised them was a small family cemetery set in the adjoining lowland planted with mature weeping willows, which so craved water. Here were the headstones of perhaps four or five members, Magnussen’s forebears all, from what Jack could glean as he scanned them. The letters M and S were for some reason the easiest for his brain to interpret immediately.
“Father, mother—and a brother, I think,” Alli said as she came up beside him. “Each stone has the places they died, along with the dates.” She squinted through the watery sunlight. “The father was ten years older, but curiously, though they both died during the same week it wasn’t in the same place.
“Who’s the smart one?” Alli said. “Daddy could have made the money.”
At that moment, they heard Annika calling them. They turned, saw her standing on the opposite rise, waving them on. Jack, wondering what she’d found, strode up the gentle incline, Alli scrambling after him.
“Look.” Annika pointed to their left, as soon they gained the modest crest.
Now Jack could confirm what he’d suspected, that Magnussen, spending like a drunken sailor, had had the pond or lake built, because on a spit of land that perfectly bisected the body of limpid water was a stone pergola, a folly in the classic Roman style. But the pergola, per se, wasn’t what had caught Annika’s attention; rather it was a seated figure drenched in the shadows beneath the pergola’s dome. From their viewpoint they could see that the figure, bent slightly forward, forearms on knees, had the aspect of a person deep in contemplation.
They descended the far side of the rise, walked on the damp, mossy ground around the skeletal willows whose branches arched overhead in a tangle of rheumatic fingers. Skirting the edge of the lake