CHAPTER 8
Lydia was in an exceptionally cheerful mood at lunch, quite as if she had never heard a single word about the devil worshipers who had defiled her father's church, and as if the confrontation the evening before between her and her son had never taken place. She and Katherine ate lunch alone in the smallest of the three dining rooms: cottage cheese and cinnamon, fruit salad and English muffins, all light but filling.
Katherine did not mention the bonfire or the things she had found during her morning inspection, but she was coincidentally afforded the opportunity to learn how many people had keys to the mansion. At the very beginning of the meal, Lydia handed her a set of keys to all the main locks in the house and said, “Now you can come and go as you please.”
“I'll guard them well,” Katherine said, tucking them immediately into her purse.
Lydia laughed. “Actually, if Yuri didn't insist, we'd probably have the doors standing open all the time. Locks are a bother in a town the size of Roxburgh where your criminals are numbered on one hand — and are usually nothing more serious than chronic drunkards. As it is, we're always having to order new sets of keys to hand out to friends.”
“People outside the household have keys to the doors?” Katharine asked, trying to keep her voice light so that the question would seem more like conversational banter than anything more serious.
“My, yes!” Lydia said. “I have a couple of friends that knew my husband when he was alive, and I see they have keys so they can use the books in the library even when the household is closed up for our spring and fall holidays. Then, half a dozen or so of Alex's friends have keys so they can use the projection room or the library or the pool while we're gone. We take three weeks off in May and three in September, to travel.”
“I see,” Katherine said. Eight keys outside the household. Even if those eight people did not share their keys with others, there were now thirteen suspects who had easy access to the mansion, thirteen including the family and servants who could have been at that bonfire the night before. “Do you think that's wise?” Katherine asked.
“To give out keys?”
“Yes.”
“My dear, don't start talking at me like Constable Cartier. I've had enough of him this morning!”
“How did it go in town?”
“Tooth and nail,” Lydia said, chuckling. “He would have preferred to have a free reign on who would be earning the overtime money I've put up for increased patrols. Interestingly enough, he already had every man on both sides of his family listed for duty. I had to straighten him out on that, but now I think well actually get some good men working. If you can imagine, he even had his ninety-eight-year-old grandfather listed for six hours overtime duty a night!”
“Sounds like you need a more reliable constable,” Katherine said, grinning.
“Cartier is fine,” Lydia said. “He is not particularly clever. But he can handle the drunks and the fist-fights, and he can organize a strawberry festival in the square with more aplomb than anyone I can imagine. In this case, he saw a chance to benefit by the community's need, but he was properly embarrassed and penitent when I helped him to see the light.” She chuckled again, having obviously enjoyed the morning.
They finished lunch and retired to the library where Lydia looked over the day's mail she had picked up while in town. She dictated two personal notes and signed three blank checks which Katherine was to fill out and mail in payment of bills received. While Katherine was working, Lydia read from a novel she had bought a week ago and was just now getting around to. Afterwards, they talked, mostly about books, until Lydia went upstairs for a pre- dinner nap.
“Dinner will be earlier tonight, at six-thirty,” she said before she left. “Some of Alex's friends are due for cocktails and conversation in the recreation room at eight. Alex asked me to invite you in his behalf.”
“I'm afraid I'd be out of place—”
“Nonsense,” Lydia said. “I am not going, because I would certainly be out of place in a roomful of energetic young people. But I know Alex would be hurt if you did not attend.”
“All right,” she said.
“Don't be glum about it,” Lydia said. “They're a likeable bunch and easy to get to know. It won't take you long to break the ice.”
Katherine said, “Are these the friends who have keys to Owlsden?”
“Why do you ask?” Lydia inquired, a puzzled frown on her face.
Katherine realized that her approach had not been nearly so subtle as she would have liked — had not been subtle at all, in fact. She said, in an effort to qualify her curiosity, “I just wondered if these were Alex's very best friends…”
Lydia accepted that as sufficient explanation. “Oh, I'd say most of these kids have keys,” she said. “But I never thought that they might regard them as status symbols, signs of favor or what-have-you. Perhaps Alex will have to hand out a larger number of keys in order to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. It's silly that such a thing could be considered a sign of special favor instead of a convenience, but I can see that some people might be upset at remaining — unkeyed.”
After Lydia had gone upstairs to take her nap, and after Katherine had finished her secretarial chores— addressing envelopes for the letters she had written, filling out checks and balancing the figures in the household accounts ledger — she went looking for Yuri and discovered that he was in town on business. She was irritated at not being able to tell him about the footprints and about her suspicions that unwanted persons had entered the house during the night, then decided that suppertime would be soon enough.
The information was not that urgent, after all.
“—has no less than five and no more than twenty years to do something about the population problem.”
“Nothing will be done.”
“I agree. Nothing will be done until it's too late for—”
“You're expecting too much of the world leaders when you suppose they're even going to let us all survive long enough to face a desperate population problem. I tell you that—”
Katherine sat in a large, brown crushed velvet easy chair near the fireplace in the recreation room, listening to Alex's friends as they argued about a handful of the world's problems as if they actually had some special sort of answers for them. But that was the bad part of it: they had no answers. All they had was a deep-seated pessimism, always expecting the worst, making gloomy predictions of doom. She did not like them, chiefly for this reason.
Besides Alex and herself, there were four other men and two women in the cozy room, some holding glasses of wine, some eating the hors d'oeuvres that Patricia had placed out for them, some just sunken into the heavily- padded furniture, as if they would never rise up again. Nearest Katherine, on a two-seat divan, were Nancy and Alton Harle, a young married couple who were both dark and quiet except for occasional comments about as pessimistic as anything one could imagine. They had whispered conversations together, smiled a lot, but still managed to come off like ravens bearing news of death. On the divan right after them were Leo Franks and his girl friend, Lena Mathews. He was tall and slim, she short and blonde and quite pretty. They were the most talkative of the lot and held the strongest political opinions, some of which Katherine did not even understand — and didn't think she wanted to. The last two guests were Bill Prosser and John Kline, both of whom had been in Alex's high school graduating class. The group was volatile, quick to react to one another, almost rowdy. She supposed that they had made a sincere effort to include her in everything they talked about, but she did not feel a part of them at all. She felt like a stranger. Whenever she spoke up, it was to make an optimistic observation to counter their unrelieved scorn for the condition and future of the world. Though they listened politely and sometimes even picked up on one of her suggestions and elaborated on it, she had the distinct impression they were only humoring her — that their own bleak outlook on life had not been touched at all by her arguments.
During a lull in the conversation when wine glasses were being re-filled, Lena Mathews asked, “You graduated from Lydia's old school?”
For some reason, it seemed to Katherine that the Mathews girl made her alma mater sound antiquated and out of date. Still, being polite, she smiled and said, “Yes, but not the same graduating class.”
Everyone laughed appreciatively.
“What was your major?” Bill Prosser asked.
