The Other Side - J. D. Robb [70]
“What happened? Why didn’t you inherit it?” Mr. Cleland asked.
“My grandfather . . . ” She felt herself coloring. Why did everything she told Mr. Cleland about Grampa make him sound like such a nincompoop? “He used it as collateral for a loan, to buy equipment for experiments on a new invention. When that didn’t work out, he couldn’t pay the loan back. The bank foreclosed—or my cousin did, I should say, since he is the bank. Practically.”
“Practically. Fortunately for you, Mr. Grimmett is the bank.”
“Yes, exactly.” How quickly Mr. Cleland got to the heart of things.
“Does your cousin want the house for himself?”
“Lucien? Oh no, he just wants the money.” She jumped up to pace. “And I’m running out of time. I’m afraid he’ll find a buyer before I can pay off the loan.”
“Pay off the loan? But I thought . . . I assumed . . . ”
“That I’m broke? I am. But. I have a plan.” And she almost told Mr. Cleland what it was—until she remembered with whom she was dealing. He might not be what she’d been expecting, he might be a good deal smarter, nicer, and much, much more charming, but he was still a ghost detective. “Well, never mind that now,” she said brusquely. “What is your plan, Mr. Cleland? What do you intend to do?”
“I’ll stay at the house tonight. Move my equipment in, get things set up.”
“Excellent. Lucien won’t object—he can’t.”
“Mrs. Grimmett?”
“Mrs. Grimmett.”
“Good. So. Leave it to me, Miss Darlington. Astra and I will perform our first experiments this very evening.”
“Dear Astra.” The dog had been pacing along with her. “What a good boy you are.” She crouched down to ruffle his ears, which he seemed to like. “Your ‘ghost dog,’ ” she said, laughing up at Mr. Cleland. “No ‘investigator’ should be without one.”
Her confidential grin faded when not only did Mr. Cleland not smile back, he looked offended.
“Oh—I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to make light.”
An awkward moment passed, but then he said, “Never mind,” magnanimous again. “A hazard of my occupation.”
Now she didn’t know what to make of him. Was he fake or wasn’t he?
“I have to go,” she said, rising. “So do you, in fact—our respective suppers are served at precisely six o’clock, in case you didn’t know.” He walked her around to the front of the house. “May I . . . um . . . count on you?” she asked, keeping the question vague. She wasn’t as certain of him as she had been.
“You may.”
“Oh—good.”
“I will open my mind and attempt to evaluate the atmosphere of the house fully and fairly, with the utmost objectivity.”
“Of course, but it really would—behoove everyone concerned if you—everyone but my cousin, that is—if you, if your, if it did indeed turn out that there were . . .”
“I understand completely.”
“Ah! Good.”
“And I assure you I shall give the matter my complete, unprejudiced, unbiased attention.”
Confound the man.
Four
The banker cousin must be selling the house furnished, thought Henry, readjusting the pillows against the headboard of Miss Darlington’s four-poster feather bed. This room still had all her furniture, everything but her clothes and most personal belongings. Left behind was a watercolor portrait of her as a young girl—he assumed it was she; same all-seeing level gaze, same privately amused mouth—in what could only be her grandmother’s rose garden. It hung on the wall at the foot of the bed, and he looked at it every time he got stuck for a word on the piece he was trying to write, under his Atticus Bent pseudonym, for Leslie’s Monthly. Since he was almost as tired as he was distracted, he looked at the painting often.
Somewhere off in Paulton, one of the ubiquitous church bells tolled eleven. Henry stubbed out his half-smoked cigar—what good was a cigar without