Not Carolyn. She’s no more interested in having sex with a man than I am. That was clear from the day I met her, and it made it easier for our friendship to develop. We were best friends, we were buddies, and one thing we were not destined to do was share a pillow.
But that was what we were doing. She may have had a pillow of her own, but her head was on my pillow now, and so was mine.
No problem. If I hadn’t had that interlude with Lettice in the East Parlour, maybe my body would have had other ideas. But it was a tired and depleted old body by now, and all it wanted was a good night’s sleep. Toward that end, huddling together for warmth like this was just what the doctor ordered. Snug in the arms of my best friend, basking in her body heat, I felt myself drifting.
See, I had the edge here. I was awake.
Carolyn was not. Sound asleep, though not in sleep’s deepest stage, she had no idea the person she clung to was her good buddy Bernie, or indeed any man at all. She was probably dreaming, and I’m sure you know how a dream will change direction in order to accommodate to circumstance. If the phone on the nightstand rings, the sleeper instantly inserts a ringing telephone into the scenario of his dream. Carolyn’s dream had to embrace not a ringing telephone but a warm body, and in her dream it became a female body, a lover’s body.
In the dream, she began to make love to this body to which she was clinging.
And not just in the dream.
It was unendurably weird. There I was, on the verge of sleep, and my best friend in the world was nuzzling my neck and moving her hands on my body. I wanted to wake her up, but I couldn’t think of a way to do so without making things worse. Wouldn’t it be better to wait it out?
Hard to say. On the one hand, the dream could quickly run its course. (They’re speedy little devils, always demanding far more time to recount than it takes to dream them in the first place.) On the other hand, there was always the chance that Carolyn’s wandering hand would fasten on a part of me not entirely consistent with the fabric of her dream, and that might give new meaning to the term “rude awakening.”
What to do? Suppose I just let out a scream and sprang out of bed. I could say I was having a nightmare, and by the time she’d calmed me down she would have lost all track of her own dream. Still, it wasn’t a very nice thing to do, and how would either of us be able to get back to sleep after that?
She moved, burrowing still closer, fitting herself against me. Her thighs wrapped around my leg, and she sort of rocked against me in a fairly basic rhythm. It took me a minute to realize what was happening, and then I just lay there while it went on happening, with the pace picking up a little and growing a touch more urgent. Then her hands tightened their grip on my arms, and she gave a little terrier-like yelp and followed it with a sort of moan, and then she sighed and rolled away from me and was still.
You can never tell her about this, I told myself. In fact, I added, it would be best all around if you could manage to forget that it ever happened.
Fat chance, I thought. About as much chance as I had of getting to sleep, and I’d been so close to drifting off…
The next thing I knew it was morning, and somebody somewhere was screaming bloody murder.
CHAPTER Twelve
Any number of things can set a person screaming. A mouse, say, emerging suddenly from behind a piece of furniture, is apt to coax a cry from the lips of the right sort of woman. (In my experience, it’s altogether useless to point out to such a woman that the mouse is more afraid of her than she is of it. Few women seem to find this information comforting, and I’m not even sure it’s true. You rarely hear a mouse scream when a woman pops out from behind the sofa.)
By the same token, a scream might indicate that the screamer had just seen a ghost, or a potential assailant, or a winning number on his lottery ticket. “Scream bloody murder” is, after all, just an expression, and just because you’ve heard such a scream doesn’t mean you’re going to find a body in the library.
But we did.
I’d seen the dead man before, although we hadn’t met. He’d been in the Great Library the first time we visited that magnificent room. He was the one who had given Carolyn a bad moment when his gaze fixed on her. At the time he’d been seated on a fruitwood fiddleback chair in front of the little leather-topped writing desk, and he’d been writing letters, I’d assumed, scribbling away furiously, then pausing to cap his pen and gaze off into the middle distance, then uncapping the pen and scribbling anew.
Now he lay a few yards from the fireplace, and no farther than that from the shelf where I’d spotted The Big Sleep-and where I could see it still, I was pleased to note. He was dressed as he’d been the previous evening, wearing a camelhair blazer with leather buttons over a tattersall vest and dark brown corduroy slacks. His shoes were chukka boots, and one of the bootlaces had come untied.
He lay on his back, sprawled at the base of the library steps. His dark hair was still neatly combed, but blood had flowed from a scalp wound, staining the carpet beneath his head. His strong features were softened in death, and his dark eyes, which had gazed with such intensity in life, were as glassy as those in the stuffed oryx.
The oryx, of course, was nowhere to be seen, having remained on the wall of the East Parlour. This placed it in the minority, as almost every other resident of Cuttleford House had responded to the outcry the way automatic elevators respond to a fire in a high-rise office building. They rush right to it, mindless of the danger, and that was just what we had done.
The hour may have had something to do with it. It was the crack of dawn, and I don’t suppose Carolyn and I were the only ones who’d been sound asleep until the cry awakened us. If we’d been reading Jane Austen, say, or playing gin rummy, we might have responded in a more gradual fashion, instead of leaping out of bed, throwing on clothes, and plunging headlong down the stairs toward the source of the disturbance.
There were five folks in the library when we got there, not counting the dead man, and there were quite a few more by the time we’d caught our breath. The screamer, I learned, was a pretty little blonde named Molly Cobbett. She was the downstairs maid, and had come in to open the drapes and tidy the room, and had responded in traditional fashion when she suddenly came face to face with the late Jonathan Rathburn.
That, Nigel Eglantine informed us, was the name of the deceased. Eglantine had been in the library when Carolyn and I burst in, as had Molly Cobbett, of course, along with Colonel Edward Blount-Buller and the redoubtable Orris, whose eyes seemed to be set even closer together than I remembered them. Others were quick to join us-Millicent Savage, her parents, Gordon Wolpert, Cissy Eglantine. The cook stood off to one side, fussing with her apron and looking quite distraught, while a red-haired young thing with a complexion that was just one big freckle gaped at the fallen guest, at once appalled and delighted that life could be so like the tabloids. (She was the upstairs maid, I later learned, and a cousin of Molly’s, the daughter of Molly’s father’s brother Earl. Earlene Cobbett was her name.)
“Awful,” Nigel Eglantine was saying. “Hideous tragedy. Dreadful luck.”
“All of that,” the colonel said. “But not terribly difficult to reconstruct, eh? Easy to see what happened.” He cleared his throat. “Up late. Couldn’t sleep. Came down here, wanted something to read. Saw just the book he wanted but couldn’t reach it.” He laid a hand on the set of library steps. “Climbed these, didn’t he? Lost his balance. Took a tumble.” He pointed to the scalp wound. “Struck his head, didn’t he? Bled like a stuck pig, if the ladies will excuse the expression.”