“Oh, yes. Someone from Eddie Thompson’s office told Greg — Daisy Marlow, maybe, he takes her out. Of course, we all knew it was on the cards, except we hoped Joseph had argued Miss Izzy out of it. And he would have argued her out of it given time.
That museum is everything to Joseph.”
“Your brother and Miss Izzy — that wasn’t an easy relationship, I gather.”
Jemima thought she was using her gentlest and most persuasive interviewer’s voice, but Coralie countered with something like defi-ance: “You sound like the police!”
“Why, have they—?”
“Well, of course they have!” Coralie answered the question before Jemima had completed it. “Everyone knows that Greg absolutely hated Miss Izzy — blamed her for breaking up his marriage, for taking little Tina and giving her ideas!”
“Wasn’t it rather the other way around — Tina delving into the family records for the museum and then my program? You said she was a schemer.”
“Oh, I know she was a schemer! But did Greg? He did not. Not then. He was besotted with her at the time, so he had to blame the old lady. They had a frightful row — very publicly. He went round to the house one night, went in by the sea, shouted at her. Hazel and Henry heard, so then everyone knew. That was when Tina told him she was going to get a divorce and throw in her lot with Miss Izzy for the future. I’m afraid my brother is rather an extreme person — his temper is certainly extreme. He made threats—”
“But the police don’t think—” Jemima stopped. It was clear what she meant.
Coralie swung her legs off the bar stool. Jemima handed her the huge straw bag with the archer logo on it and she slung it over her shoulder in proper Bo’lander fashion.
“How pretty,” Jemima commented politely.
“I sell them at the hotel on the North Point. For a living.” The remark sounded pointed. “No,” Coralie went on rapidly before Jemima could say anything more on that subject, “of course the police don’t think, as you put it. Greg might have assaulted Tina — but Greg kill Miss Izzy when he knew perfectly well that by so doing he was handing his ex-wife a fortune? No way. Not even the Bo’lander police would believe that.”
That night Jemima Shore found Joseph Archer again on the beach under the stars. But the moon had waxed since their first encounter.
Now it was beginning to cast a silver pathway on the waters of the night. Nor was this meeting unplanned as that first one had been.
Joseph had sent her a message that he would be free and they had agreed to meet down by the bar.
“What do you say I’ll take you on a night drive round our island, Jemima?”
“No. Let’s be proper Bo’landers and walk along the sands.” Jemima wanted to be alone with him, not driving past the rows of lighted tourist hotels, listening to the eternal beat of the steel bands.
She felt reckless enough not to care how Joseph himself would interpret this change of plan.
They walked for some time along the edge of the sea, in silence except for the gentle lap of the waves. After a while, Jemima took off her sandals and splashed through the warm receding waters, and a little while after that Joseph took her hand and led her back onto the sand. The waves grew conspicuously rougher as they rounded the point of the first wide bay. They stood for a moment together, Joseph and Jemima, he with his arm companionably round her waist.
“Jemima, even without that new moon, I’m going to wish—” Then Joseph stiffened. He dropped the encircling arm, grabbed her shoulder, and swung her around. “Jesus, oh sweet Jesus, do you see that?”
The force of his gesture made Jemima wince. For a moment she was distracted by the flickering moonlit swathe on the dark surface of the water. There were multitudinous white — silver — horses out beyond the land where high waves were breaking over an outcrop of rocks. She thought Joseph was pointing out to sea. Then she saw the lights.
“The Archer house!” she cried. “I thought it was shut up!” It seemed that all the lights of the house were streaming out across the promontory on which it lay. Such was the illumination that you might have supposed some great ball was in progress, a thousand candles lit as in the days of Governor Archer. More somberly, Jemima realized that was how the plantation house must have looked on the night of Miss Izzy’s death. Tina Archer and others had borne witness to the old lady’s insistence on never leaving her house in darkness. The night her murderer had come in from the sea, this is how the house must have looked to him.
“Come on!” said Joseph. The moment of lightness — or loving, perhaps? — had utterly vanished. He sounded both grim and determined.
“To the police?”
“No, to the house. I need to know what’s happening there.”
As they half ran along the sands, Joseph said, “This house should have been ours.”
Ours: the people of Bow Island.
His restlessness on the subject of the museum struck Jemima anew since her conversation with Coralie Harrison. What would a man — or a woman, for that matter — do for an inheritance? And there was more than one kind of inheritance. Wasn’t a national heritage as important to some people as a personal inheritance to others? Joseph Archer was above all a patriotic Bo’lander. And he had not known of the change of will on the morning after Miss Izzy’s death. She herself had evidence of that. Might a man like Joseph Archer, a man who had already risen in his own world by sheer determination, decide to take the law into his own hands in order to secure the museum for his people while there was still time?
But to kill the old lady who had befriended him as a boy? Batter her to death? As he strode along, so tall in the moonlight, Joseph was suddenly a complete and thus menacing enigma to Jemima.
They had reached the promontory, had scrambled up the rocks, and had got as far as the first terrace when all the lights in the house went out. It was as though a switch had been thrown. Only the cold eerie glow of the moon over the sea behind them remained to illuminate the bushes, now wildly overgrown, and the sagging balus-trades.
But Joseph strode on, helping Jemima up the flights of stone steps, some of them deeply cracked and uneven. In the darkness, Jemima could just see that the windows of the drawing room were still open.
There had to be someone in there behind the ragged red-brocade curtains which had been stained by Miss Izzy’s blood.
Joseph, holding Jemima’s hand, pulled her through the center window.
There was a short cry like a suppressed scream and then a low sound, as if someone was laughing at them there in the dark. An instant later, all the lights were snapped on at once.
Tina was standing at the door, her hand at the switch. She wore a white bandage on her head like a turban — and she wasn’t laughing, she was sobbing.
“Oh, it’s you, Jo-seph and Je-mi-ma Shore.” For the first time, Jemima was aware of the sing-song Bo’lander note in Tina’s voice. “I was so fright-ened.”
“Are you all right, Tina?” asked Jemima hastily, to cover the fact that she had been quite severely frightened herself. The atmosphere of angry tension between the two other people in the room, so different in looks yet both of them, as it happened, called Archer, was almost palpable. She felt she was in honor bound to try to relieve it.
“Are you all alone?”
“The police said I could come.” Tina ignored the question. “They have finished with everything here. And besides—” her terrified sobs had vanished, there was something deliberately provocative about her as she moved toward them “why ever not?” To neither of them did she need to elaborate. The words “since it’s all mine”