Ashes to Ashes Read Free Page B

piano-playing and embroidery. Where could she have gone, what could she have done?”
    “If you choose to suffer fools gladly, there’s no excuse for you,” Michael prounounced.
    And that, Rebecca responded mutely, is certainly something you’ll never be accused of. She pointed to the doorway opposite the bedroom. “What’s in there? More skeletons in closets?”
    If Michael heard her teeth grinding he ignored them. “That’s the piper’s gallery. Naething there but a set of ill-tempered pipes. No bogles to leap out and scare you.”
    “And you?” she replied with a laugh. “You almost cartwheeled when I spoke to you.” Through the door she glimpsed an elaborate plaster ceiling half erased by twilight, the vault of the two-story Hall.
    “You crept up on me,” he repeated indignantly.
    Her laugh evaporated for lack of nourishment. Rebecca realized she was exhausted; she’d gotten up before dawn to drive here. She threw her purse onto the bed and flicked open the closest suitcase. “I’d better unpack now.”
    Michael thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans and with disgruntled courtesy asked, “Would you like a cuppa?”
    “Sure, thanks.”
    The soft pad of his footsteps faded away. Somewhere wood creaked and something, a hot water pipe, probably, sighed. Somewhere the cat glided through the shadows searching for its master, James Forbes, the bachelor, the miser. He’d mised enough to keep this place, with its compelling, disturbing discrepancies, going. And his heart was in the right place, to have willed the fruits of his father’s rapacity back to Scotland.
    Rebecca laid her makeup case on the dressing table. In the frame of the slightly tarnished mirror was a postcard picture of Dun Iain. Or was it? She pulled the card out and turned it over. The legend declared the structure to be Craigievar, the Aberdeenshire castle which was Dun Iain’s prototype.
    If Rebecca had known last summer she’d be working at Craigievar’s bastard child in America, she’d have rented a car in Perth and gone there. But then, Ray would have pointed out that the tour bus was already paid for, the countryside was the equivalent of the wilds of Africa, and the natives drove on the wrong side of the road. “That’s just the way things are, Kitten,” he’d have said patiently, and emitted another cloud of smoke from his pipe.
    Prying Ray from his routine for that trip had been quite a feat, even though once there he’d followed her in bemused pleasure from site to site. But then, back home, it’d been back to the schedule. Tuesdays they’d eat pizza, half black olives for him, half green peppers for her. Sundays they’d attend the concert at Clemens Auditorium. Fridays he’d bring his overnight bag to her apartment and turn another page in The Joy of Sex .
    Three years ago his calm, quiet, predictability had been endearing, evidence of his conscientious effort to do right by her. Rebecca wasn’t sure when it’d become stultifying. She’d told him she’d eat olives if he’d eat peppers, that she’d buy tickets to a football game if he’d go with her, that some Friday she’d like to wing it without the book.
    He’d responded with loving pats on the head. She’d been considering dynamite in his coffee when she heard about the position at Dun Iain.
    Rebecca unpacked her tape player, found a plug, and snapped in a Mozart tape. The music was tinny and shallow, absorbed by rather than dispelling the silence. The walls seemed to lean disapprovingly inward. She turned off the player. On the mantelpiece she laid her dog-eared copy of John Forbes: Man of Iron ; the thirty-year-old biography had cost her quite a trek through the secondhand bookstores in Kansas City.
    She’d left her typewriter in the car. No great loss if it disappeared; it was a manual her parents had given her as a high school graduation present almost ten years ago. Oh, for a computer.
    A programmer’s job, Ray frequently pointed out, would