"If you can stand him, I guess I can put up with Kathy's giggling," Pat said.
Smiling, Josef reached out for her, and then contemplated his dirt-streaked sleeve in some dismay. "I'll meet you down here in ten minutes," he said. "And if we're lucky, the kids will take a long time getting the food."
III
They had half an hour alone before Mark and Kathy returned with pizza and spaghetti and other Italian delicacies. "Enough food for an army," Josef grumbled; but Mark managed to get rid of most of it. He refused to talk while he was eating, and Josef let him enjoy this small revenge. But when Mark had shoved the last bite of garlic bread into his mouth, the older man said, "Here's your chance to shine. Or are you going to sit around smirking while we make wild guesses?"
"It was so obvious," Mark said patronizingly.
"Not to me."
"Well, look. The ghost had to be one of the Turnbulls. All the Bateses died in their beds, after lives of sickening virtue. That isn't necessarily conclusive, I admit, but the suggestion of blue eyes confirmed my suspicion that we were dealing with a Turnbull. Mr. Turnbull was fair, and so was Peter. It wasn't unreasonable to suppose that Turnbull's daughter by his first marriage had also inherited his coloring.
"Mary Jane was a ghostly figure in every sense of the word. We knew nothing about her except for the occasional references in Susan's diary. Susan thought she was an old witch-she even called her that once. Well, a lot of kids think of bossy big sisters as witches. But I got to thinking-Mary Jane did seem to hassle the kids a lot, and there she was, a spinster at almost thirty, with a younger half brother who was the answer to a maiden's prayer- handsome, domineering, sexy…"
"Of all the cheap, slipshod, pseudo-Freudian nonsense," Josef exclaimed. "Why shouldn't the ghost have been Peter, as you first believed?"
Kathy stirred. She had changed into jeans and an over-sized tailored shirt. The masculine clothing only made her look more delicate. Her lowered eyes and clasped hands appeared demure, but something in her expression half prepared Pat for Mark's next statement.
"It was really Kath who figured it out," he said.
"You?" Kathy's father stared at her with unflattering surprise.
"I was the brains of the combination," Kathy said sweetly. "Mark was the muscle."
"Well, we sort of worked together," Mark said. "But Kath gave me the first… I mean, she had the hunch that it wasn't Peter after all. Like she said once, how could he do this if he was in love with the girl? I mean, that made sense, you know?"
"Not necessarily." Josef was still staring at his daughter. "If Peter was the domineering, arrogant young man we thought, and if he had died before he could get the girl he wanted-"
"All surmise," Mark interrupted. "Peter was probably pretty cocky; who wouldn't be, in his position, with everything going for him? But we didn't find out anything about him that would support the idea that he was wicked or demented. The atmosphere the ghost produced was sick-malevolent. We got to wondering, Kathy and I, if maybe it hadn't been that way in life. Sick, hating. Peter was a soldier, he didn't have to repress anything; he could take out his anger and frustration by fighting."
"I knew it wasn't Peter," Kathy said dreamily.
"Sheer irrational romanticism," her father grumbled.
"Maybe," Mark said. "Maybe the idea came from… somewhere else. Anyhow, once we had decided Peter wasn't the ghost, we had to find another candidate. Mary Jane was a distinct possibility. That's why I was so mad when you didn't buy her letters." He gave Josef a sidelong glance, and added, "The book filled in the missing pieces in Susan's story, and gave us the final clue. Only I was too dumb to see it at first."
"The clue was the fact that Mary Jane was a Confederate spy," Kathy explained. "Remember the reference to Cousin Alex? That was Colonel Alexander. I told you about him-the man who escaped from Fort McHenry and broke his leg when he jumped from the parapet. The book said he was passed on from one Confederate sympathizer to another. One of them was Mary Jane. She had to be careful when she referred to him, in case her letters to Cordelia were intercepted."
"And how do you suppose she got those letters to Richmond?" Mark asked. "Enemy territory, in wartime?"
Josef gave Pat a hunted glance. He was being beaten back on all fronts, but he fought every step of the way
"Okay, I'll buy the spy part. But how you got from that to Mary Jane's illicit passion for her brother
"The letters reeked with it, Dad," Kathy said, in a fair imitation of Mark's most superior tone. "And, like Mark said-"
"As Mark said," her beleaguered father interrupted
"As Mark said, she was always spying on the kids and tattling to their parents. She was the one who caught Susan and Peter-you got that, didn't you?"
"Well, I-"
"Susan said in her diary that someone must have seen them together," Kathy persisted. "And Mary Jane bragged about being the one who saved Peter from the fatal consequences of-"
"All right, all right." Josef put his head in his hands. "I'm dizzy trying to follow your logic. Let's see. Given the fact that Mary Jane was a spy, you leaped to the conclusion that there was a secret room in the house."
"That was really dumb," Mark said. "I should have thought of that much earlier. The houses were twins, weren't they? There was a tunnel in the Bates house-
"But I assumed that was constructed by Mr. Bates, years after the house was built," Pat exclaimed. "It wouldn't follow that there was a matching tunnel-
"Not necessarily, no," Kathy said. "But I was reading a book about old houses, and secret rooms and passeges weren't uncommon in architecture of that period. It was all part of the fake Gothic stuff. There was a place called. Pratt's Castle, near Richmond, built in about 1850, that had a secret spiral staircase and a hidden room where guns and ammunition were stored during the Civil War. And Mary Jane would have to have someplace to hide fugitives, especially with the Bateses so close. Mark is right, we should have figured it out sooner."
This time Josef made no objections. The certainty in Kathy's voice overruled simple logic. Pat knew that he had been convinced, not by the girl's reasoning so much as by his own irrational sense that this theory somehow fit-not the facts of the case, but its atmosphere.
"I'll buy it," Pat said. "But, Mark, how did you know he-his body was still there? You did know, didn't you? You couldn't have identified those poor anonymous bones unless you expected to find them."
"Come to think of it," Josef said, recovering. "They still haven't been officially identified. Have you any solid evidence on that, Mark?"
"It's rather complicated," Mark said patronizingly.
"Translation: he hasn't got any evidence," Josef said, in an audible aside.
"I'll try to simplify it," Mark went on, without appearing to hear the comment. "The fact that Peter Turnbull's body was never found has bugged me all along. Then there was the discrepancy in the stories of how the Turnbulls were killed. One said it was at Gettysburg, the other that it happened during a minor skirmish. So I-I mean, Kathy-got the idea that maybe there was some truth in both stories, but they got garbled, as history often does. We know the Turnbulls were alive in late June of 1863, just before Gettysburg.
"Not all the men who died in the war died in the famous battles. The cavalry especially was running around the countryside all the time. So we thought, suppose Peter was killed in a skirmish after the battle, during the retreat? We looked up Company K, the unit we thought the Turnbulls might have joined. And…" Mark reached for one of the books that always surrounded him, and opened it. "The unit fought at Gettysburg, all right. It also skirmished heavily at Williamsport while covering Lee's retreat. This is Manakee's Maryland in the Civil War. He says: 'For more than a week after Gettysburg, Maryland roads were alive with soldiers, all the way from Washington County to Baltimore and Washington Con-stantly ranging between the two armies were cavalry units of both sides. Often they clashed in small, briefly fought engagements.' " Mark looked up from the book "By July seventh, the Confederate army had reached the area near Hagerstown, but they couldn't cross the river because Union cavalry had destroyed their pontoon bridge, and the river was swollen by heavy rains.