Someone to Love (22 page)

“That’s a good one,” Clive said. “Mutual fascination. I’ll have to remember that one.”

Gladys looked at Jace. “About four years ago a local boy impregnated a duke’s daughter. There was a bit of a row, but the story was hushed up. The duke threatened to call the parents of every student if what he called ‘the Margate scum’ weren’t banned forever from the school.”

Jace nodded. “So I take it that the daughter wasn’t allowed to marry the kid from Margate.”

That made the others laugh.

“All I want to know is if a Stacy Evans went to school there or not.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” Gladys said, “but I think you also want to know the names of all her classmates. If your young lady did attend the school, you’ll want to call them and ask who she knew.”

Jace smiled at her, then looked at Mick. “You’d better keep her,” he said.

Mick put his hand over Gladys’s and said, “I intend to.”

An hour before, Jace had dismissed Mrs. Browne, watched as she left the kitchen to go back to her own apartment, then he’d briefly told Gladys and Mick about Stacy having been his fiancée and that he believed she’d been murdered. He told them she’d met someone at Priory House the night before her murder and he wanted to find out who it was.

“Gladys?” Jace asked. “Do you have keys to the school?”

“Not to the records office,” she said quickly and firmly.

“But you do have keys to get into the buildings?”

Both Nigh and Clive shouted “no!” at the same time.

“I can’t help on this if it’s to be a break and enter,” Clive said. “Sorry, Mr. Montgomery, but I can’t risk my whole future for this. If some other bloke on the force was caught, they’d forgive him, but not me. Not with my past record.”

Jace leaned back in his chair. “I’m open to ideas.”

“All right,” Clive said, then leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I think I have a plan.”

“Mr. Montgomery,” the headmistress of Queen Jane’s School purred. “I do believe we can accommodate your niece.”

“Our family doesn’t usually send children to boarding school, but Charlotte wants to go, so who are we to deny her? The child wants to play field hockey.”

“Oh, good, then she’s an athlete.”

“Yes, she’s a real jock.”

The woman kept her smile even through Jace’s slang. She handed him a fat sheaf of papers. “Our brochure is in there and an application to the school.”

“Thank you so much,” he said, taking the papers.

In the next second, a screaming alarm filled the room and their ears.

“What in the world?” the woman said. “I don’t think this is a real emergency,” she shouted above the din, “but I must go and see about my students.” She quickly moved to the door and waited impatiently for him to leave her office.

Jace caught his sleeve on the chair, then had trouble extricating it, then he tripped over his shoelace.

The woman was looking anxiously at the girls who were beginning to gather in the central hall. Her keys dangled impatiently in her hand.

“So sorry,” Jace shouted as he stood up and started toward her. But he dropped his papers, then went on one knee to pick them up.

“Mr. Montgomery!” she shouted. “I must see to my girls!” She gave him a look of disgust, then ran from the room.

In one quick motion, Jace took the yearbook for the year 1994 from the bookshelves by the door and slipped it under his jacket. Last night he’d done some hard thinking and he realized that the only year Stacy could have gone to the school was in 1993-94. Her mother died the summer of 1993, and her father had just married a woman only a few years older than his daughter. It was Jace’s guess that her stepmother would have shipped her off to an English boarding school to get rid of her. Jace knew that Stacy had graduated from a school in California, so if she had gone to Queen Jane’s, she hadn’t stayed all year.

The alarm was still screeching as he left the office with the papers the headmistress had given him in his hands. She was standing but a few feet from the office door, directing her students as they filed out of the building. Jace made a show of turning the knob on the door so it would lock behind him, and she gave a nod as though to tell him she approved.

Jace left the building smiling—while the girls around him hooted and yelled.

“Are you what’s in Margate?”

“I can see why we’re not allowed to go to the village if you’re what’s there.”

“My room’s on the southeast corner. I’ll throw you down a bed sheet.”

“Ha! You’ll throw down the mattress and jump on it.”

By the time Jace got back to his car, his face was red. He handed the yearbook to Nigh, then pulled out of the parking lot. “Girls weren’t like that when I was young.”

“Of course they were. Girls have always been like that,” she said, flipping through the book. “Bingo! Stacy Elizabeth Evans.”

Jace paused a second to glance at the photo in the yearbook, then drove back to Priory House with a smile on his face.

“Now all we have to do is find out who she met in this area,” Nigh said, “then we’ll know who sent her the invitation.” She leaned back against the headrest. “Jace?”

“I know,” he said. “You’re going to ask me if I’m prepared for what I might find out. I’ve heard it all before from my uncle Frank. You should meet him. You two think alike.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You should. He’s a self-made billionaire.”

“Ooooh,
that
Frank Montgomery.”

Jace laughed as he pulled into the driveway of Priory House. It was Sunday, Mrs. Browne’s day off, and she’d gone wherever she went on Sundays, leaving them alone in the house. Clive’s plan to get the yearbook had been so simple that Jace wasn’t sure it would work. Gladys often went to the school on Sundays to catch up on her cleaning, so it was easy for her to pull the alarm at an agreed-upon time. The rest had been up to Jace.

Once they were in the house, Jace and Nigh bent over the yearbook, their heads nearly touching. He was determined to not let her or anyone else see his shock and hurt that the woman he’d loved so much hadn’t told him that she’d attended a boarding school in England. Maybe it had been for only a few months, but Stacy had been there long enough to fall for someone. All he’d had to do, years later, was to send her a postcard with a date and Stacy had shown up. To see him again, she’d begged the man she was planning to marry to accompany him to England, and she’d picked a fight so she’d have an excuse to run away.

“See anyone you know?” Jace asked Nigh.

“Several, but only from the society columns. Let’s get on the ’Net.”

An hour later, they had done a great deal of research, but how did they contact these young women and ask them questions?

“You can’t just call Chatsworth and ask about a school chum of one of the daughters of the house,” Nigh said.

“Why not?” Jace asked. “You have to remember that I’m an American and we fought a war to do away with your class system.”

“Give me a break!” Nigh said. “Can just anyone call your sister and ask her questions?”

“First of all, they’d never get through to her. She has three kids and not a moment to—”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

He laughed. “Okay, I get your point, but I have an idea. There is one woman I know who can get put through to the Queen if she wants to.”

“Ha! Only a horse person could get through to the Queen.”

“But we don’t need the Queen, do we?” Jace asked. “We just need someone who can get through to these rich English girls, and there is one woman I trust more than any other in the world.”

“Who is that?”

“My mother.”

Nigh laughed. “You’ll turn it all over to her?”

“Every bit of it. You think Gladys bought a color copier?”

“From what Mrs. Parsons said, Gladys bought every machine known, and Mrs. P. didn’t buy any of it for her. Which means that Gladys got it all for half the price Mrs. Parsons charges.”

“Let’s go copy these pages, then send them to my mother. She’ll charm her way into their houses.”

J
ace and Nigh spent the day trying to pretend they weren’t nervous. They played Scrabble—Nigh won—and they wandered about the garden, with Nigh giving opinions about what she’d do to the garden if the house were hers.

“You like this house, don’t you? If you had a choice, you’d live here, wouldn’t you?”

“No,” she said honestly. “The house is cold, drafty, and it’s full of ghosts. And I’m not talking about just Ann Stuart. I think my mother’s spirit is here and maybe my father’s. Or maybe it’s just me and my memories that are here.” She shivered. “No, I wouldn’t like to live in this house. There’s something else in it too, but I don’t know what it is.”

“I think it’s the ghost of that damned lady highwayman. I think she did live here and I think her presence is here.”

“Maybe you’re right. Shall we check the machines again?”

All day long they’d checked the fax machine, the answering machine, and Jace’s e-mail. His mother kept them posted every step of the way, of who she’d called and what she’d found out. So far, there had been nothing about who Stacy met outside the school.

They had found out that Stacy had been a very, very unhappy student and mostly kept to herself.

“I guess that’s why she never told me that she’d spent most of a year in a boarding school,” Jace said. He was doing his best to understand why Stacy had kept such a big secret from him.

Mrs. Montgomery had called Jace three hours ago and told what she’d found out from the woman who had been the headmistress of the school when Stacy was there. When Stacy entered the school, she had been a newly traumatized person. Her mother had died just months before the term started and she had been sent to live with her father, a man she’d rarely seen in her life. He had just remarried. The man didn’t have time to take care of his expanding business and two needy females. His new wife won out, and Stacy was sent to school in another country.

“One of the girls I talked to,” Mrs. Montgomery said, “told me that no one knew much about Stacy. She spent the few months she was there in her room.”

“But there was a man—” Jace began.

“I’m getting to that, dear,” she said, “but you must be patient. But first of all, I want to know who is there with you. I can hear her breathing on the phone.”

Nigh jumped away from the telephone as though she’d been burned.

“It’s the gardener’s boy, Mick,” Jace said.

“You never could lie well. Who is it?”

“Got a pen?”

“Of course.”

“Look up N. A. Smythe on the ’Net. Spelled S-M-Y-T-H-E. You’ll see all about her. She lives here in Margate, when she isn’t globetrotting, that is, and she’s been helping me with…well, with whatever I need help with.”

“You sound much better than you did when you left, so tell her thank you from me.”

“I will,” Jace said, smiling at Nigh. “So now tell me what else you found out.”

“About three months after she arrived, one of the girls I talked to said that Stacy had changed. She was as secretive and as separate from the rest of the girls as ever, but they saw her smiling now and then. One of the girls said she thought that sometimes Stacy wasn’t in her room all night.”

Jace raised his eyebrows at Nigh, as he knew she could hear.

Nigh nodded, yes, this was possible back in ’94.

“Was she sneaking out to see someone?” Jace asked his mother.

“They thought so. I think the security of the school was rather lax at that time, which is why the headmistress was dismissed the next year and the current one hired. Is she lax?”

“Airport security could learn from her,” Jace said. “Can you keep calling and find out what you can? I need the name of the man she was seeing.”

“Jace, honey, I’ll ask you again: Are you sure you want to find out all this information? You might find out some things about Stacy that you won’t like.”

“I’m sure. In fact, the more I find out, the better I feel.”

“I’m not sure I agree with that. Oh! My goodness! I just pulled up your N. A. Smythe. She’s beautiful! And she looks to be intelligent. Well done!”

“Mom,” Jace said, laughing and embarrassed at the same time.

“What does the ‘N. A.’ stand for?”

“Nightingale Augusta.”

“She should fit right in with our family. Okay, I have to go. I’ll call you when I know more. Or I may send a fax with a name. I love you.”

“Me too, Mom,” Jace said softly, then hung up.

The phone didn’t ring again until 1:30, just after lunch. It was his mother and she was yawning. She’d been on the phone and fax and Internet all night, compensating for the time difference in England.

“I have a name and an address,” his mother said without preamble, “and you’re to go to her house to have tea at four. Her name is Carol Heatherington, and she was Stacy’s roommate.”

“Her roommate!” Jace said, looking at Nigh in triumph. “Did she give you a name?”

“No. Carol wants to talk to you personally because she feels very bad about Stacy. She was out of the country when Stacy died or she would have come forward.”

“She knows that Stacy didn’t kill herself.”

“No, quite the contrary. Carol thinks that Stacy did kill herself and she thinks she knows why.”

“That’s what she said?”

“Yes. Jace, darling, I did warn you that you might find out things you didn’t want to know. You should leave now. I told Carol that you’d be bringing a friend with you. Jace?”

“Yes,” he said, still reeling from being told that someone who knew Stacy believed that she’d killed herself.

“I know you have your own mind, but I suggest that you listen to what this young woman has to say. Really
listen.
”

“Yeah, okay, sure, Mom,” Jace said listlessly. “I better go. I’ll call you when I get back.”

“Make it twelve hours from now. I need some sleep.”

“Thanks for this, Mom. Love you.”

Mrs. Montgomery gave a jaw-cracking yawn. “Me too. Give my best to Nightingale.”

“Nigh,” he said. “We shorten it to Nigh.”

“I look forward to meeting her.” She hung up.

Nigh looked at Jace. She’d heard enough of the conversation to know what it was about. “I think we should put on our best clothes and go to tea,” she said. She looked at the address Jace had written down. “It will take us a couple hours to get there.”

Silently, Jace nodded, then went upstairs to change. He didn’t want to give himself time to think about what he was finding out. The reality that Stacy’d had a life that he knew nothing about was at last coming through to him. He knew that from now on, what he found out was going to be difficult for him to hear. Part of him wanted to stop where he was, but the bigger part knew he had to go on.

“I asked you here today mainly to assuage my own guilt,” Carol Heatherington said. She was young, not very pretty, but she had that English skin that was flawless and she had a presence that only money and breeding could give a person. She had a pretty house set near a river, surrounded by thirty acres of land. Her husband commuted every day to London, leaving her with her horses and dogs and a young child. She seemed utterly content with her life.

Carol poured the tea into Herend cups. “I’m afraid I wasn’t very kind to Stacy when we were at school. You see, I had requested that I be put in a room with my best friend, but instead I was put in with this angry, sullen American girl. I’m afraid I took out my disappointment on her.”

Jace grimaced and had to clamp his mouth shut to keep from telling her what he thought of someone who would be unkind to a girl who’d just lost her mother.

Nigh took the cup of tea. “We’re all bitches at that age,” she said calmly.

“The irony is that years later I found out that my so-called best friend had asked her grandfather to call the head of the board of the school and ask that they not give me as her roommate. I took my anger out on Stacy when I should have been angry at my sister-in-law.”

“Your sister-in-law?”

Carol smiled. “I married her brother, which is just what she didn’t want me to do.”

“Did Stacy meet anyone that year? Probably a man?” Jace asked.

“Yes,” Carol said. “Back then—it does seem long ago, doesn’t it?—we were still allowed to go into Margate on the weekends. All of us girls stayed together. I’m afraid we were frightful snobs. We traveled in little packs, each of us belonging to one pack or the other.”

“But Stacy wasn’t part of the group,” Jace said.

“No. She was American and…I’m not defending my actions, but truthfully, Stacy never made an effort to be a part of us. Sometimes we asked her to go with us, but she always refused. It didn’t help that she said she hated England and that her father was going to send for her any day. We all thought boarding school was perfectly normal, but I think Stacy looked on it as a punishment. I think she thought it was a jail and that it was her duty to try to escape.”

“With someone?” Nigh asked.

“Yes. At least I think so. Stacy was a very secretive person. You could talk to her but she told you only what she wanted you to know. She never really revealed any confidences. Did you find this to be true?” she asked Jace.

“I wouldn’t have said so, but I found out that that was true. Even though we were engaged to be married, I didn’t know that she’d spent a year in an English boarding school.”

“I think Stacy looked on it as most people would think of having served a term in prison. She was probably too embarrassed to speak of it. I could see that she’d keep it a secret. I’m curious as to what happened with her father and his young wife.”

“Stacy told you about them?” Jace asked.

“Only in the most sarcastic manner. She used to make us laugh with her black humor. One time a little girl, about twelve, came into the dining room, and we all wondered who she was. Stacy said, ‘She’s my father’s new wife.’”

“That sounds like her,” Jace said, looking away for a moment. “You said that you think Stacy did commit suicide and it was your fault.”

“I’ve been haunted by Stacy since I heard of her death. I wish I’d been kinder to her, made more of an effort to include her in our gatherings.”

“Why would you think she committed suicide?” Nigh asked, trying to steer the woman onto the path of what they needed to know.

“For Tony, of course.”

“Tony?” Nigh asked.

“Tony Vine. He was the man she was in love with. At least I think she was in love with him.”

Nigh and Jace looked at each other. “Could you tell us all that you know about Mr. Vine?”

Carol took a sip of her tea. “The first time I saw him, I was in Margate with half a dozen other girls. It was a Saturday afternoon and I thought Stacy had stayed back at the school. I asked her if she wanted to join us, but she said she had to study for a chemistry exam. Hours later, I was with the girls and there was a street market that day. I was looking at the things in the stalls when I looked up and all my friends were gone. I didn’t see them anywhere, and I’m afraid I panicked. I started running back toward the school, but as I passed a side street I saw a flash of bright red. I stopped where I was. Curiosity overran my fear of being without my herd of girlfriends.”

“Was it Stacy?” Nigh asked.

“I thought so. She had a beautiful red silk scarf—we all envied Stacy’s American clothes—and I thought I saw that scarf going around a corner. I looked to see if anyone could see me, then I went down the little road toward where I’d seen the scarf.

“When I got to what looked like a garage, I saw the scarf again and turned the corner. There was Stacy wrapped about a young man. Oh, excuse me,” she said to Jace.

“No, that’s all right. I’d like to hear everything.”

Carol put down her cup of tea. “You have to understand that almost all of us girls were virgins. We talked about sex all the time and we all made out as though we had the sexual experience of a woman of the streets, but actually we knew nothing. But there was Stacy, the quiet American who kept to herself, entangled with a man in a way that most of us girls had never even imagined. She had one leg up about his waist and—”

She broke off after a look at Jace’s face.

“You saw them in Margate,” Nigh said. “Do you know where else they met? And how did you find out who he was?”

“I was afraid they’d see me, so I left, but I went back to the market. My curiosity was stronger than anything else, so I wanted to see if I could find out more about this man Stacy was with.”

“Man?” Nigh asked. “Not a boy?”

“Oh, no! He was thirty if he was a day, and we were only sixteen then. I think Stacy was seventeen.”

“A thirty-year-old man,” Jace said softly.

“Did you see them again?” Nigh asked.

“Not that day. I went back to the school and there was Stacy, curled up on her bed with her chemistry book. You would never have guessed that she’d been out of the school, certainly not that she’d been twined about a man nearly twice her age.”

Carol took a bite of a cucumber sandwich. “After that, I can tell you that I began to watch Stacy. I never let her know and I never even hinted at what I saw, but I watched her.”