Chapter Seven:
Kestrel Hall
Two hours in the car and Grant talked for the first forty minutes, which she had not expected. Not about the will or Pierce or any of it. The house. The oak out front that got hit by lightning in 87 and would not die. Bernadette the cook who’s been threatening to retire since 96. The lake he fell through when he was nine, his father pulling him out by the collar and neither of them ever saying a word about it after.
“You don’t talk about him much,” Elish said.
“Not much to say. He was good at being a Lancaster. Took most of him.”
She looked out at the trees, bare, grey, and let it go.
Kestrel Hall just came up out of the woods. Stone, three floors, dead ivy, and every window lit at two in the afternoon like the house was waiting up. Or watching. She pressed her thumb into the tape on the ring so hard it hurt.
“Breathe.”
“Im breathing.”
“Youre breathing like you are about to be arrested.”
“Ive never been arrested.”
“I know. It shows.” He killed the engine and sat there with both hands on the wheel, not looking at her. “Whatever happens in there you are my fiancée. Only version. You don’t have to like them.”
“I don’t.”
“Good. Keep it off your face.”
Catherine Lancaster was in the front hall and Elish had got ready for a lot of things but not that she’d be so small. Five foot two maybe. White hair cut short, grey wool dress, a brooch, eyes so pale they looked washed, like a photo left in a window too long. No smile. She put out a hand and it was dry and cold and strong as a clamp.
“Miss Vance.”
“Elish. Please.”
“Elish.” A pause, a beat too long, on purpose. “Grant says you met at a benefit. I did not know my son went to benefits for anything except the tax deduction.”
“He spilled wine on me.”
“That sounds like him. Come, Bernadette has made far too much, she does when she’s nervous.”
Dining room with a table for twenty and four places laid at one end. Catherine at the head, Grant beside Elish, and across from them Pierce, lounging, wine glass already half gone, who’d driven up on his own and lifted it to her like hello, I remember you.
“Vance. I’ve been trying to place it all week. The Connecticut Vances?”
“No.”
“Boston?”
“My mother is. I grew up in Old Saybrook.”
“Ah, a little town. I love a little town, everybody knows everything about everybody.”
“One way of putting it.”
“And what do you do, Elish?”
“Right now I’m between things.”
“Between things!” Delighted. “Grant, does not she sound like someone you’d want to keep an eye on?”
Grant’s knife stopped on the plate. Half a second. “Ill manage.”
Catherine had not said anything for a while. She was looking at Elish left hand, the fork, the little green stone catching the window. Elish felt it on the back of her neck like a palm.
“That ring.”
Everybody stopped.
“It’s my grandmother’s,” Grant said, easy, too easy. “Grandfather left it. Miriam had it.”
“I know whose it is.” Catherine’s voice did not change but her knuckles went white round the glass. “Harold gave her that in sixty-four and never let anyone touch it. I asked once, when Richard and I got engaged, could I wear it, and he said no, it was not for wearing, it was for keeping. And now he leaves it to you to hand to a stranger and says nothing.”
“He said I would know what it meant.”
“And do you?”
“Not yet.”
Nobody spoke. Somewhere in the walls a clock is going. Across the table Pierce had gone quiet, properly quiet, the amusement draining off his face into something thinner, something that looked a lot like arithmetic.
“Well,” said Catherine finally, putting the glass down. “We shall have to wait and see.”
Afterwards, she took Elish’s arm. Just took it, no asking, and steered her out and down a long hall of dark portraits, and Elish went because she did not know how to not.
“Youre not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“Someone more eager.” They stopped at the end, in front of a tall oak door with a brass handle worn smooth by fifty years of hands. Catherine did not touch it. “My son has been alone a long time. Of course he’s suspicious of anyone who turns up exactly when the will says he needs her.”
“Im not here for the will.”
“Everyone is here for the will, my dear. Even me.” Not cruel. Tired, mostly. “That was Richards. My husband’s study. Grant hasn’t opened it since the funeral, and keeps the key on him. I imagine you know that.”
“It’s in the contract.”
“The contract.” The corner of her mouth moved. “Yes, Grant does love a contract. He thinks if you write a thing down it can’t go wrong.”
“Doesnt it help?”
“It helps people who mean to keep their word.” And she turned and looked straight at Elish, those washed-out eyes, and Elish had the horrible feeling of being read to the bottom of the page. “Do you, Elish? Mean to?”
“Yes.”
Came out so steady she nearly believed it herself.
“Good,” Catherine said. Then, lower, still looking at the door, “Then you should know. My husband spent the last year of his life asking one question. In there, at night, with the door shut. I heard it through the wall.”
“What question?”
“Who do I tell?”
The hall got colder. Or Elish did.
“Never said what. Never who. I asked him once and he looked at me like I’d hit him.” Catherine fixed her brooch, straightened it, and did not need to. “He died in March, three years ago. Before he decided. I don’t know why I am telling you. Honest eyes, maybe. Or I’m seventy-one and I have carried it so long it feels like furniture.”
She walked off. Just went, heels on the boards, no goodbye.
And Elish stood there with her heart going like a fist on a door, staring at the brass handle, at the crack underneath.
Light. A thin line of it along the bottom. And a shadow crossing it, slow, one foot then the other.
Somebody was in there.
Grant was in the library, she’d heard him laughing with Pierce not five minutes ago. Dominic was out with the car. Catherine had just left. Only one key and Grant had it, on him, she knew, he’d said. So who?
Somewhere on the other side a drawer slid shut. Soft. Careful. Somebody who knew how to close a drawer without a sound.
She should go. She knew she should go, and her hand was already going up towards the handle like her body had decided without her, and then
“Elish?”
Grant at the end of the corridor, coming fast. She snatched her hand back and turned and put nothing on her face, nothing, blank, and he stopped a few feet away and looked at her, and at the door, and at the light underneath.
Colour left him. Just drained, no other change.
“Stay here.”
He took a key from his inside pocket and it shook. She saw it shake. It took him two goes to get it in the lock, and he pushed the door open with his shoulder like he expected it to push back.
Empty.
Dark wood, leather chairs, a desk under a dust sheet, like nobody’s been in for three years. Every shelf is tidy. Every surface is clean.
Except the window at the far end, open a hand’s width, curtain breathing in and out. And on the boards beneath it, small and bright, a single button.
Pale green. Black edged.
The kind you find on a cuff.
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