“Don’t you go and start dating older men,” Sadie warned. “You’re too young for that…You’re still young enough to give Spencer a little brother or sister, someday.”
I snorted. “Considering the pool of available men in a little town like Quindicott, I probably have a statistically better chance of getting struck by—”
An electric flash lit the night sky, followed by an ominous boom.
“’Nuf said,” I concluded.
Aunt Sadie sighed. I could see she wasn’t happy with my lack of confidence that I’d be finding some knight in shining armor around the next bend. But she didn’t argue. The Thorntons always did have that in common—we were realists.
“So when was the last time you heard from Mr. Chesley? Before this morning’s urgent summons, I mean. Did you two have a falling out?”
A shadow crossed Sadie’s face. “Peter’s marriage fell apart the same year my father passed away. At that time, we’d known each other only through the book selling, but, for a short time, we became much closer. I’d go to Providence and we’d…socialize…you understand, dear, don’t you?”
“I understand.”
“Peter helped me a great deal, and I believe I helped him…but it wasn’t meant to be…we were different people, and after about a year, our relationship…well, it soured. Neither of us wanted to pursue anything permanent, but we parted friends. After that, Peter and I saw less of each other, but he remained a good customer, and he made a point of coming by the store at least once a month to see how I was, share a drink or some dinner. Like I said, he was always a good friend.”
“But what happened to him?”
“One afternoon, around, oh…going on ten years ago now, Peter showed up at my shop in something of a state. He spoke about a crisis in his family. An emergency. He told me I wouldn’t see him again for six months at least. But I never saw or heard from him again, until this morning, when he called out of the blue and told me he had some collectable books he wanted me to sell for him.”
“He never contacted you before that?”
Sadie shook her head. “I did try calling him at his home in Providence, but his phone had been disconnected.”
“What happened to him then?”
When he called today, Peter explained that he’d moved back to his boyhood home in Newport. That’s where we’re going now…Prospero House, his family’s oceanfront estate. He apologized for losing touch, but he said after his return home all those years ago, he got busy with family affairs, became something of a recluse.” Sadie sighed. “The truth is, dear, Peter could very easily…how do I put this? He could get lost in things.”
“What do you mean ‘get lost in things’?”
“He’d…obsess.”
“You mean he’d become compulsive? Like OCD?”
“Yes, dear…I’m sure you’ve noticed that particular tendency in some of our more, shall we say,
“Now that you mention it…”
At least three regulars came to mind. They e-mailed or called like clockwork, looking for missing volumes in collections we’d never carried, signed editions we’d never advertised—just to be sure they hadn’t missed an announcement on our Web site or listing in our catalog. But their searching was passionate and constant, almost ritualistic. I had engaged each of them in conversation at one time or another and discovered we were just one call on a long list of calls they made every day.
“If Peter found himself on the receiving end of a major inheritance,” Sadie continued, “any number of things related to it might have taken hold of him and pulled him in…consumed him.”
“An estate in Newport is pretty impressive,” I noted. “He must come from real money, then?”
“It was a surprise to me, I have to tell you. To think that Peter came from old Newport stock, that his family owned a mansion. He’d never mentioned it to me in all the years we’d been friends. The Peter Chesley I knew was so unassuming. And I would have never guessed he came from money. The man always seemed so frugal.”
“So what kind of books did Mr. Chesley collect? Mysteries?”
“Oh, heavens no.” Sadie waved her hand. “Peter’s passion was history. The Revolutionary War—books by or about the Founding Fathers. I believe his great-great-great-grandfather was at Bunker Hill. He was crazy for anything dealing with that period.”
“You moved books like that?”
Sadie shrugged. “I moved everything and anything, in my time…. Oh, look there!”
We both saw the next turn at the same moment. Roderick Road was downright schizophrenic. With twists and turns that seemed to leap out of the darkness, the road appeared to have been designed around the landscape. We circled a huge outcropping of pure New England granite, and what appeared in the gloom to be a tree at least two hundred years old, its protruding roots gnarled.
“You should feel good that Peter didn’t forget you after all these years,” I said.
Sadie nodded. “Yes, it’s very nice of him to offer me first pick of the books he plans to sell. But for the life of me, I can’t see why I couldn’t come by tomorrow or Tuesday. Why we had to make this trip tonight of all nights.”
I raised an eyebrow. If the man had obsessive-compulsive disorder, I figured that was reason enough—and it also gave me a clue why Sadie had walked away from the relationship all those years ago.
“There’s the turn,” Sadie said.
I saw the gateposts at the last possible second, and hit the brakes too suddenly—the tires immediately began hydroplaning across the wet asphalt. Careening out of control, the Saturn spun off the road, into the shoulder, the soft, wet mud finally stopping us with a teeth-rattling jolt.
The car stalled, cutting off the hissing heater and swishing windshield wipers along with the rumbling engine. The abrupt silence was followed by the
“Are…Are you okay?” My voice cracked from the tension.
Face pale, Sadie took a deep breath and nodded.
Sadie and I sat in silence for a moment, listening to the rain batter the metal. Then I shifted into neutral and turned the ignition key. The engine came to life. We both let out the breaths we’d been holding. I eased the car into reverse and slowly applied the gas. The tires skidded a little, but the sedan rolled back onto the pavement without incident.
Two tall granite gateposts flanked the driveway, bridged by a wrought-iron arch that spelled out the house’s name in rusty, pitted letters. As I rolled through the open gate, lightning flared like a shattering bottle rocket, illuminating the sprawling mansion.
“Goodness!” Sadie exclaimed, getting a good look.
“Man alive,” I murmured.
I felt a shiver—but not from the raw weather. We had arrived at Prospero House.
“Looks like the architect couldn’t decide whether his client was the Addams Family or JP Morgan,” I said.
The looming, four-story mansion was so grotesque it even gave my ghost the creeps.
CHAPTER 2
I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” 1845
