“If you know so much, why are you asking me about it?”
“For God’s sake, do you have to?”
He had said something then she didn’t understand. “There’ll be no singing or winning if I don’t.”
“Then I want you to promise me something, Eric. You know I’m not too strong, you know how I worry. So, unless you promise me never to mention this subject again—”
“You’ll what, my dear?”
“Don’t make me say it, Eric.”
He had laughed drunkenly. “Ira Washburn would replace you with your understudy. You’d make a ridiculous Lady MacBeth with that attitude. Goodnight, Maudie. I haven’t heard a word of this...”
From the garage behind the house, she heard the station wagon starting up. Feeling bereft and vulnerable, Maud stood and went to the window, pulling back the curtains on an early spring morning still gray and chill, the mists rising like fogs from the patch of lawn behind the Griffiths’ home.
The black station wagon was pulling out of the driveway, Eric at the wheel, but this would have been only a guess if she hadn’t known his profile so intimately, because there was little visible of him now, what with the collar of his jacket pulled up high around his turtleneck sweater, the big, dark sunglasses and the peak of a tweed cap shadowing his forehead.
The Saturday morning turned clear and bright with the rising sun, dissolving a ground mist as fine as lace and revealing the first of the spring flowers — snowdrops and yellow star-grass, Miss Scobey noticed, identifying these along with pinkings of early clover.
On her drive to Chester County that morning, Miss Scobey’s Volkswagen threaded the narrow roads, twisting through rolling meadows and open country, where horses were out to pasture and winter-rotted haystacks and manure piles were steaming in the first heat of this sunny day.
Despite the glory of the weather, for which she had duly and enthusiastically thanked the Lord, Miss Scobey’s thoughts were again censorious as she reflected on that strange gentleman, Eric Griffith, and his troubled wife, Maud, at death’s door and still unrepentant in the shadow of her Maker.
The files and notes relevant to the Griffiths were on the seat beside her, tucked into her old leather briefcase. She had reread them last night and once again been filled with exasperation at the Griffiths’ heartless indifference to their orphaned niece, Jessica Mallory.
Turning onto a narrow black-topped secondary road, Miss Scobey resolved to temper her judgment with Christian mercy, putting out of mind the abrasive evidence in the files and remembering instead the miraculous transformation, the growth in grace that had occurred in the case of Eric Griffith. And perhaps there was hope as well for his wife, and if Miss Scobey would be the instrument of the Lord in Maud’s salvation, then she would, she must, perform the role with forbearance and kindness. As a token of this Christian goodwill, Miss Scobey had stopped at a health food store in Philadelphia to buy a suitable present for the ailing Mrs. Griffith — a round, squat jar of rose-hip jelly now tied with a fancy green ribbon and resting on the seat beside her briefcase.
Frowning, Miss Scobey braked her car, slowing it down to a stop at a road barrier, a long wooden sawhorse with lanterns suspended at either end of it. A crudely drawn sign reading ‘detour’ and an arrow were tacked to the crossbar, diverting traffic (for no good reason that Miss Scobey could understand) into a narrow dirt road flanked by stands of timber and deep, cavernous excavations which had been dug out many years ago for their rich veins of feldspar and mica.
The silence out here in the back country was restful and almost complete, the stillness trembling now and then with the cry of birds and the sound of spring winds high in the trees.
Turning onto the dirt road, she saw that the steep, downward sides of the old mica pits still sparkled in the sun where sharp bits of the spikey mineral pierced the brown earth. She drove on slowly, her car dappled with the light filtering through the big trees that arched over the road.
Glancing up, she saw in her rearview mirror that a black station wagon had turned into the lane behind her and was closing the distance between them rapidly. Miss Scobey slowed down and angled off as far as she could toward the right side of the road, straightening the wheel when she heard the thorn-bushes brushing the side of her car.
Cranking down the window beside her then, she waved to the station wagon to pass — overtake was the word the British used, she recalled from the first and only time she had been abroad, a charter flight which had included a walking tour of the Cotswolds and a weekend of sightseeing in London. She checked the rearview mirror again and saw to her surprise and irritation that the big black car gave no intention of going around her but had slowed to match her speed and was now only six or eight feet behind her bumper.
She despised this sort of motoring discourtesy, so unnecessary, so stupid, but there was nothing for her to do but move back into the middle of the lane, because directly ahead of her there was the lip of a deep mica pit, its steep, bramble-choked sides cutting sharply down into a gorge, whose floor was covered with shards of rock and winter-black shrubbery.
What happened next was as unexpected and ghastly as a fatal lightning bolt. Swerving to the left, the station wagon’s motor roared with a rush of crescending power and then it was abreast of Miss Scobey’s small Volkswagen, the driver looming high above her on this rutted country road. There was something familiar about him, the set of his shoulders, a reddish-blond glimpse of sideburns, but Miss Scobey couldn’t be sure if she knew him or not because his features were almost completely obscured by the collar of his tweed jacket, sunglasses, and the pulled-down peak of his cap.
The big black vehicle angled sharply toward her and she cried out desperately, “Watch it, watch it, you idiot!” but even as her straining voice echoed on the cool and fragrant spring air, there was the hideous sound of grinding metal. The station wagon crunched heavily into the side of her car and sent it spinning out of control down the steep side of the mica pit, turning and crashing end over end until it landed on its roof on the bottom of the man-made ravine, wheels spinning futilely in the air.
Miss Scobey lay in a tangled heap in the wreckage of her car, upside-down and hopelessly disoriented, her head and cheek pressed harshly against the windshield and dashboard, one of her arms twisted at an unnatural angle through the spokes of the steering wheel.
In her shock and confusion, she felt no pain at all, no particular concern or anxiety, remembering only the crash of the two cars, the grating metallic wrenchings and ruptures that still seemed to be exploding in her eardrums.
Later, in her drifting, dreamlike condition — she couldn’t guess how long it had been since the accident — there was the sound of footsteps, and she saw — and how bewildering this was — a man’s arm coming through the open window and a hand closing on her briefcase, snaking it free from the car.
There was some pain now, a sharpening clarity, and Miss Scobey was grateful when the man’s arms and hands came through the window once again. Touching her shoulders, the hands moved along her arms to her throat, strong hands, warm, strong hands, tightening now, slowly but inexorably, and Miss Scobey realized with a touch of wonder that these hands had not come to help her. Her second-to-last thought was how grossly unfair this whole business was. Her last thought was, what a shame to waste that lovely jar of rosehip jelly, smashed and broken against the windshield.
Miss Scobey did not live long enough to see the smoke begin to curl from the rear of her car or to hear the crackle of flames.
Chapter Sixteen
A clean, hard wind was blowing down Skyhead and through the trees at Ballytone the morning of Andrew Dalworth’s funeral. There had been a formal memorial service the previous evening at Easter Hill. The names of mourners from Ireland and the United States and other countries were now listed in the registry book which Flynn had set out on a rosewood table in the great hall.