Cally had meant to retreat to the Rose Room after her interview with the Captain, to get her notes in order and maybe even get started writing, but she was much too rattled to think about that now. Instead, she wandered out onto the porch. The sun had moved to the west side of the house, filling the front yard with cooling shade. It seemed far too lovely an afternoon for a nice person like Bethany to be having to spend in an emergency room.
She sighed and sat down on the step where she had so recently seen Bethany shelling peas and, though she had never really believed in such things, she said a prayer for her. The little Calico named Cyndi Lauper came out from under the shrubbery and joined Cally on the step, rubbing against Cally’s hand to invite her to scratch her ears.
Presently Foster and Nell’s car pulled into the parking lot. The red truck, carrying Ignacio and Ian May, followed before the couple had quite got out of their car. Cally met them all on the stone walkway while Ian was explaining to his daughter and son-in-law what had happened in their absence. “She’s going to be fine,” he assured everyone. “Two ribs in her back are cracked, and the muscles in her back have been badly bruised, but everything will heal up just fine with lots of rest. She needed a couple of stitches on her head but nothing is broken – maybe a mild concussion. They’re going to keep her overnight for observation.”
Nell’s hands were shaking and tears were pooling in the corners of her eyes. “Oh, poor Bethany,” she said over and over, biting her already well-bitten fingernails.
Foster pushed up his glasses. “She’s definitely going to need pain medication and lots of bed rest when she gets back,” he noted.
As if on cue, Joan appeared, coming down the porch steps to join them. “Well that just figures!” she lamented. “And with all this work to do, too!” She paused to kiss Ian on the cheek. “Ian, I have just booked the most wonderful opportunity for us! A paranormal investigation team is going to come and film a TV episode here!” she told him proudly, not letting Bethany’s accident rain on her parade. “They’ll be staying for free, of course, but the exposure will be great for business!”
Foster groaned, and Cally said, “I thought you said...”
“Someone should call the sheriff,” Nell interjected, looking at the front door and nibbling her thumbnail.
“I’m sure this is not a police matter,” Foster told her patiently. “It was just an accident.”
“Absolutely!” Joan agreed. “We can’t afford to have police crawling all over the place, talking about foul play, when we’re just about to get so much publicity!”
All eyes looked to Ian for a decision on the matter, but his head was bowed. He looked tired and sad. “No, I suppose you’re right,” he said. “There’s nothing to bother the sheriff over. Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he said, touching his daughter’s arm. “Bethany will be alright.”
Cally felt like putting her arm around his sagging shoulders. “Mr. May, is there anything I can do to help?”
“Well you can certainly help me!” Joan said. “I have a lot of work to do now to get ready for this investigation, and I won’t have time to take over that woman’s chores just because she decided to get herself put on R and R! Maybe you can do her job for a while. There’s not much to it.
“If you’re not too busy writing,” she added, and something about the way she said it made Cally feel as if she had been slapped.
“No, no, of course I can help,” Cally said. “I do have some secretarial experience...”
“Well, that settles that, then.” Joan turned back to the house. “You can start by straightening up the mess in the Hall. I’d tell Maria to do it but I’m going to have lots of extra work for her to do, to get ready for this Investigation!”
“Her name is Katarina!” Cally said to Joan’s retreating back. Joan waved a dismissive hand without turning around, and went inside.
J
Cally stood in the Hall feeling useless while Ignacio knelt beside the fender with a bucket and a sponge, cleaning blood from the floor. “That was very nice of you to volunteer,” he told her. “You don’t have to do it, though. Kat can take care of everything.”
“No, I don’t mind,” Cally said. She couldn’t imagine how Kat could possibly keep an eye on the phones and the door while doing all the other work she already had to do. “I’m sure it’ll just be for a couple of days. Anyway I can at least get all those spilled papers sorted out and put away properly. That’ll give Bethany one less thing to worry about when she gets back.”
“Well” he said, dropping the blood-soaked sponge into the bucket and picking up the pieces of the broken chair. “You’ll need a chair. I’ll bring you a new one.”
“Wait a second,” Cally said as he started to carry the bucket and broken furniture away. “Look at this.” She put a hand on the half of the chair that had been the base. The threaded wooden dowel that had screwed into the seat was smooth and neatly finished, and there was no broken-off remnant of it protruding from the seat. “This chair isn’t broken. It’s just been twisted all the way up, so far that the seat fell off.”
“Why would Bethany do that?” Ignacio wondered. “She’s almost as short as Kat.”
“I don’t know. Joan is tall. Maybe she was doing some work at Bethany’s desk while she was away this morning...” But then their eyes met and they both shook their heads; Ignacio said, “Yeah, right!”
“Maybe we really should have called the sheriff,” Cally said.
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“No, I think it’s just an old chair,” Ignacio decided. “They design the new ones so they can’t come apart like that. I have a modern one at my house. I’ll bring it for you.”
“I don’t know...”
Ignacio smiled kindly. “Besides, who would want to hurt Bethany?”
Cally glanced at Joan’s office door, then shook her head. It didn’t make sense that Joan would do such a thing. She was grouchy and inappropriate, but she wasn’t evil. And besides, why would she put a person out of commission on whom she depended to do all the work she didn’t want to do?
After Ignacio left, Cally retrieved the jumbled bills and receipts from the bottom cabinet drawer and sat down on the floor to begin sorting them into piles, attempting to match them to the labels of the folders out of which they had fallen. Foster came down the stairs into the Hall and leaned over the desk to look down at her. “Had to give Nell a sedative,” he said. “This sort of thing really puts her out of whack.” He walked around to Cally’s side of the desk and peered down at the papers on the floor, nudging some aside with the polished toe of his shoe. “We really appreciate you helping out,” he said.
“It’s fine,” Cally said. “I used to do this for a living, before I discovered my true calling.” She had her hands full, or she would have enclosed the words “true calling” in finger-quotes. “People with word skills always seem to get shunted into secretarial duties, for some reason.”
“Well,” said Foster, sitting on the edge of the desk, “I just wanted to tell you...” He looked around the Hall, toward the front door and the entry to the dining room. “You might want to watch out. That Ignacio and his wife, those foreigners, I don’t quite trust them. They might stand to benefit from getting Bethany out of the way.” He pushed up his glasses and cast nervous glances toward the parlor door and the stairs.
“Benefit how?” Cally asked, pausing with a lap full of papers. As far as she could tell, this accident could only have added to Katarina’s workload.
“Well, my father-in-law, you see, he has a soft heart. He has already given them so much. They had nothing when they came here and he gave them a house. The old stone building that used to be the kitchen for Vale House, you see, back when kitchens were separate buildings.” He nodded toward the dining room, where the tall windows faced out onto the lawn and its white gazebo and the little stone building nestled in the shrubbery. “He had it converted into a nice cottage for them, and he lets them live there rent-free. That made sense, back when this was a farm, and there was a lot of work for them both to do. But Ian is too old for farming now, and turning this house into a B&B a few years ago was sort of his way of retiring. There really isn’t enough work, anymore, for as big a staff as Ian maintains around here. He’s a charitable man, but unless business picks up quite a lot, he can’t afford to keep everyone on. And, well... I don’t know if you can tell, but he’s really slowed down a lot lately. It may be time for him to consider a nursing home.”
“I hardly think he’s ready for that!” Cally said adamantly. “Not for a good while yet!”
“Maybe. Maybe. You don’t know him as well as I do.” He looked around the Hall again and pushed up his glasses. “Well, anyway, the thing is, the other day, I overheard Ian telling Bethany he was considering leaving the cottage to her in his will. Can you imagine if Ignacio and Katarina found that out? You don’t see a will anywhere in that mess there, do you?” He toed the jumble of papers on the floor again.
Cally shook her head. If she had seen one, she would not have told him – someone else’s will was none of his business. She had enough secretarial experience to understand that sort of thing, anyway.
“Well, what I mean is.” Foster stood up and came closer to her, stepping on some utility bills as he did so. He leaned down and put a hand on her shoulder. “Just be careful,” he breathed into her ear. “Like I said, they may seem nice, but just keep an eye on them. Especially him. There’s something about him that just gets my hackles up. I don’t know if we can really trust him.”
He seemed to be looking a little too long at the papers in her lap, but Cally couldn’t be sure what he was looking at. She put a hand across the top of her shirt. “I’ll be careful,” she promised him, though privately she thought he was barking up the wrong tree.
He patted her shoulder. “Good. It’s probably nothing, but we can’t be too careful.” He stood and pushed up his glasses. “I’ll be talking to Ian in his quarters, if you need me for anything.” He gestured through the dining room toward the narrow hall that led to the south wing, and then went that way himself.
Ignacio returned a few minutes later with a modern-looking office chair. It was made of black steel with mauve upholstery and padded armrests, and it looked completely out of place in the antiques-furnished Hall. He rolled it around the desk and Cally sat in it resignedly, adjusting the seat height with the pneumatic lever. “Well, at least it’s comfortable,” she had to admit.
Ignacio smiled and nodded. “Now, listen,” he said. “If you change your mind about this, just let me or Kat know. Nobody will hold it against you. This is not your other duties as assigned.” He grinned and winked.
Cally laughed. “I’ll just get everything filed away in some semblance of order, anyway,” she said. As Ignacio went out the front door, she transferred the stacks of papers from the floor to the desk and felt like she had already accomplished quite a lot.
Looking around the sunny hall, she sighed. It was pleasant here, barring Joan’s voice ranting about something on the other side of the oak door. She wouldn’t mind helping out until Bethany recovered, since she was going to be living at Vale House for a while anyway. Perhaps she could bring her laptop downstairs and actually get some writing done during her stint as Bed and Breakfast Receptionist. It wasn’t as if the phone was ringing constantly. Perhaps if she also brought her MP3 player and ear-buds, she could even block out Joan’s voice...
Her hand landed on a thick envelope and she stopped sorting. It didn’t look like a bill or an equipment warranty, and she wasn’t sure which pile it belonged in. She opened the clasp and pulled the sheaf of papers out far enough to see what they were about. The first page read, in bold-face centered type, “Last Will and Testament of Ian Lionel May” and bore today’s date. Cally shoved it back into the envelope quickly. She realized this must have been what Ian had sent Bethany to the lawyer for, just that morning – it seemed ages ago, now.
Joan burst out of her office and Cally set the envelope down quickly. “I suppose you’ll have to join us for dinner tonight,” Joan declared, striding up to the desk. “Ian always had her join us.” She nodded sharply at the desk and Cally understood she was referring to Bethany. “Though I don’t know why. I keep telling him it isn’t proper to get that chummy with staff.”
“I would be happy to go and get dinner in town,” Cally said, trying to keep her voice steady as she held Joan’s gaze and slipped the envelope slowly beneath a stack of electricity bills.
“You can do that tomorrow night,” Joan said. “We’ll need you at this one. We all need to talk about how to get ready for this TV investigation!” Her expression made it clear the discussion was over.
Cally cocked an eye at her. “Whatever you say. I’ll be there, boss.”
“Don’t get sarcastic with me. It doesn’t look good on you.” Joan turned toward the dining room, shouting “Maria! We need dinner, chop-chop!”
When the sound of Joan’s clomping heels had faded into the back hall, Cally removed the envelope from under the bills and tucked it into the bottom filing cabinet drawer. She noticed her hands were shaking as she did so (probably, she guessed, in frustration at being held back from fastening themselves around Joan’s throat.) She stuffed some still-unsorted receipts into a random folder and placed that on top of the envelope. She would ask Ian later, when she had a chance to talk with him alone, what he would like her to do with the will.