Bristol House Read Free Page B

hall.
    Listening to silence.
    Her suitcases were on wheels, but stuffed so full, they were difficult to maneuver. She jockeyed both of them and her tote bag and handbag into what was to be her bedroom. This time, at least at first sight, the unusual art wasn’t quite so overwhelming. Maybe because it was ten a.m. and the light was slanted toward the wall with the bed and its charming crewelwork coverlet, not the imposing black and white mural.
    The spread was much too nice to use as a platform for unpacking. Annie folded it and put it in the chest’s bottom drawer, then hoisted the first of her suitcases onto the bed. Half an hour later all her things were hung up or folded away, and she reached for the tote bag.
    It was large and roomy and blazoned with the name Davis School, the last place she’d worked before coming to London. Her laptop was in it, along with a number of other things, including the sketchbook with the drawings of what she’d seen in those few extraordinary moments on Monday afternoon. Annie pulled out the sketchbook, found the drawing that showed the monk’s head and face from a number of angles, and propped it against the pillows. Next she retrieved her laptop.
    She’d Googled Geoffrey Harris the previous afternoon, as soon as she’d left Jennifer Franklin and gone back to the Two Princes. There were dozens of hits. He was, as Jennifer said, quite well-known. His program seemed to be a kind of exposé, like Dateline or 60 Minutes back home, but focused on elected officials and their activities. She’d found a number of magazine and newspaper articles written by or about him, and transcripts of at least three dozen interviews he’d conducted with every notable politician and statesman of the last half-dozen years, mostly skewering them for something they had or hadn’t done. The only personal information she uncovered was a story from four years earlier saying Harris’s wife had been killed in a car accident.
    Annie had captured a head shot from his Web site. She sat on the bed with the laptop on her knees and pulled it up. He looked slick, supremely assured, and not just good-looking but magnetic. Dark hair, light-colored eyes—maybe gray, maybe blue—and a cleft in the chin. She looked again at the sketchbook. No doubt whatever. The man she’d met at the British Museum didn’t just look like the monk she’d drawn before she’d ever seen him. The man was a dead ringer for the ghost.
    She had spent a fruitless hour imagining Harris had impersonated the monk, thinking she’d been thrust into the middle of some elaborate scam that involved both him and Mrs. Walton—otherwise how had he gotten into the apartment? If so, she had to be the mark, as it were, the person being scammed. Why? She had neither money nor influence, nothing anyone could possibly want. Like most conspiracy theories, it was absurd.
    Maybe Geoffrey Harris had an identical twin. But why then no mention of such an interesting tidbit online? And even if he did, it simply shifted the parameters of the conspiracy, without making it any less farcical. The same objection negated the possibility of a true double who wasn’t a relation. Besides, Annie didn’t think the degree of resemblance that passed for an unrelated look-alike could fool her artist’s eye, much less her hand. She knew exactly what she’d seen, both at Bristol House and in the British Museum.
    She was left with only one logical conclusion. Geoffrey Harris looked as he did because the monk was his ancestor. Meaning, however extraordinary, that the monk had once been real and that Annie Kendall had seen a ghost. Never mind that she didn’t believe in them.
    That wasn’t all she had to process. Meeting Harris fewer than twenty-four hours after she saw the ghost was unlikely to be a coincidence. The monk was sending her a message, declaring his intentions. Very well, she would make hers equally clear.
    Annie set the laptop on the bed, grabbed the sketchbook