“It’s very faint. But I think that waitress was in here.”
“Well, she was supposed to come and get the wine, but it ended up being Miles and Charles who fetched it.”
We walked down to the end of one corridor of the cellar. I was facing a bank of champagnes. Who had a whole wall of champagne? We turned at the bottom and began to head up the other way, and the feeling in my chest grew heavier and heavier. It wasn’t claustrophobia. What I was sensing was death. We moved on, and I stopped. “Here. Something terrible happened here.” I felt nearly sick. And my skin was growing clammy. I forced myself to breathe and focus, and I looked around carefully. But this corridor looked exactly like the last one. Rows and rows of dusty bottles. And then something caught my eye. Down toward the bottom near the ground. I dropped to my knees.
“What is it?” Rafe asked.
“Look,” I said, pointing. He crouched down beside me, and only then could he see what I had noticed. An area where the dust had been rubbed off some of the bottles.
He nodded. “Her scent is a little stronger here, too.”
“Do you think she was killed here?”
“Yes. Do you?”
I nodded. But also felt very confused. “What does this mean?” I asked Rafe.
“I think it means that you should be very careful being alone with your friend Miles.”
“No.” I hated the idea of Miles being a killer. He’d already been falsely accused once.
The bottles in the wine cellar had been placed cork toward the wall so that the round bottoms were all that I could see. Rows and rows of them. Not only were they covered with dust but also cobwebs. But there in that one section near the bottom, it was as though someone had taken a duster and wiped them clean. I believed this was where Pamela had died. Rafe seemed to agree with me. I was surprised that he hadn’t been able to more acutely smell her death, but of course, in a strangling death, there hadn’t been any blood. I felt as though my own throat were constricting as I swallowed. “But Miles and Charles were together. You’re not suggesting they both did it, are you?”
He looked as puzzled as I felt. “I have no idea. I don’t know why the two of them together would kill her or why either of them separately might have.”
“I saw an old Hitchcock movie once about people who plotted a death just to see if they could do it.” I dredged up the memory. “Rope. I think that’s what it’s called.”
Rafe looked at me with his eyebrows slightly raised. Right. Movies weren’t his thing, though I was attempting to improve his cultural education. I’d made him sit through Star Wars and some of my other favorite movies, but we’d never watched Hitchcock. I’d be adding some of them to the list.
“In Rope, they were college students too. They had approached murder as an intellectual exercise.” I tried to imagine Miles plotting cold-blooded murder and it wouldn’t come. He wanted to be an actor. Not a killer.
But Charles? I could see him turning unpleasant if he didn’t get what he wanted. And he clearly thought of himself as quite the ladies’ man. Could Pamela have given him the brush-off? Even if she had, I couldn’t imagine him killing her, unless it was a drunken accident.
“So now we know that she was killed here and then moved into the billiards room, what does that change?” Rafe was looking around at the bottles as though he were either hoping one of them would break open and give him the answer, or perhaps he was browsing the collection.
I looked around me too. “I think this changes everything.”
That brought his attention back to me. “How so?”
I was going on instinct and a kind of hunch that wasn’t even fully formed. The last thing I was ready to do was share it. I only knew one thing. “We have to get hold of Ian.”
Rafe never looked very happy when the subject of Detective Inspector Ian Chisholm came up. Probably because he knew I had dated Ian a few times. The romance hadn’t really gone anywhere, but I think Rafe always worried that one day we might pick it up again. What he had to offer and what Ian Chisholm had to offer were so very, very different. I liked Ian, but my secret powers would always be between us. I didn’t have to hide my true self from Rafe. What I felt for him was deep and complicated, and I couldn’t see how it could end well. Still, there was no doubt that we were more than friends.
“Let’s get out of this cold cellar,” I said, walking out. It felt even more oppressive bringing this load of confused emotions into an already confined, dusty cellar. I felt like I needed to get some air on every level.
The first thing I did when we got out of the cellar was to call Ian on my cell phone. He answered right away. “Lucy. What can I do for you?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m just pulling into Hugo Percival Brown’s manor house. Can I call you back?”
“No. I’m here. Your timing could not be more perfect.”
He didn’t sound so delighted that I was at the manor house. “What are you doing there?” His voice was sharp and accusing. “You’re not snooping, are you?”
What other possible reason could I have for being here? Of
