Sonnet of the Sphinx Page 3

Grace paused to admire a snowy scene of a man on horseback followed by another man on foot.

  “Jolly good, what?” Mr. Matsukado sounded as if he had learned English from 1930s stage productions. “The poet Teba and his manservant,” he informed her. “Hokusai portrayed many poets and illustrated many poems.”

  “Lovely.” She noted the painstaking detail, the vibrant browns and blues of the woodcut, while wondering if there was anything pointed in the allusion to the “poets and poems” comment.

  “Hokusai?” Peter inquired.

  Mr. Matsukado looked pleased. “You are familiar with his work?”

  Peter answered Grace’s glance of inquiry. “Katsushika Hokusai is one of Japan’s most famous artists. You’ve seen that woodcut of the giant wave and the men in boats?”

  “Bang on, old chap,” said Mr. Matsukado. “Much of the work of Hokusai has become cultural icon. His images appear in everything from advertising tomanga. ” To Peter, he added tantalizingly, “There are also several works by Hiroshige.”

  “I’m no expert on Asian antiques or art,” Peter replied, “but it’s obvious even to me that the market value of what you have here far outweighs the worth of Mallow Farm’s original contents.”

  Mr. Matsukado’s smile altered imperceptibly. Thanks to years of teaching devious adolescents, Grace recognized a disingenuous expression when she saw one. In the vernacular of the young ladies of St. Anne’s, what up?

  “The things that were sold to you have…great sentimental value for me, don’t you know.” There it was again, like a Noel Coward character caught in a time warp.

  “How so?”

  “It is difficult to explain, old chap. You must simply take my word for it.”

  Peter was silent. But then, he wasn’t the sentimental kind.

  “These things around us,” Mr. Matsukado urged, “would bring great value in your trade. The items here”—he gestured to a complete set of elaborately costumed dolls arranged on what appeared to be a seven-tiered altar—“are worth many thousands of dollars.”

  That was no exaggeration; Grace had read enough reports on Japan by high school authors to know thesehina dolls were valuable heirlooms passed down through generations. Mr. Matsukado’s disregard for them was startling.

  Peter said, “And you wish every item from Mallow Farm returned to you?”

  Mr. Matsukado’s eyes glittered. “Yes. This is most important. Every book, every…paper.” He rubbed his hands in unconscious anticipation.

  He knows.Grace didn’t dare look at Peter. She was torn between jubilation that the letter did indeed refer to a work by Percy Shelley and the realization that they must in all decency return it—the letterand any other clues to the poem that might be concealed in the books and papers of Mallow Farm.

  Peter said lightly, “This appears to be one of those offers one cannot refuse.” Her heart sank as he added, “It’s a deal.”

  3

  They dined in the brick courtyard. Red pagoda-shaped lanterns illuminated the lingering English twilight. Silvery bells tinkled softly on the breeze. Menservants in white coats waited upon the table.

  Sampling pork-flavoredbutajiru soup from a lacquered bowl, Grace recalled a line by Shelley.Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark.

  She could not help feeling the Shogun’s insistence that they stay for the evening meal was designed to keep them from having extra time to sift through Mallow Farm’s contents.

  She replaced her soup bowl in position on her left. On the right sat another fragile bowl piled with white rice. Behind the two bowls were three flat plates, one with beautifully arrangedsashimi, one a grilled dish, and finally, something that appeared to be stewed seaweed mixed with other greens.

  “Delicious,” she said, noting the expert way Peter set about using his black chopsticks.

  Mr. Matsukado petulantly tossed his own chopsticks to the ground. The hovering manservant scurried to remove the offending utensils. “Mr. Okada made many decisions that I regret,” the young man said. “I’m looking for a crackin’ good English cook.”

  Peter’s eye met Grace’s.

  “That shouldn’t be difficult,” she responded. She decided to forgo using her own chopsticks since their presence on the table seemed to offend their volatile host.

  “It shouldn’t be, no.” Mr. Matsukado was curt.

  Hastily she tried a bite of the crispy grilled dish. Inside, the meat was tender and had a rich, dark flavor like pâté. “That’s different,” she said.

  “Grilled eel,” Mr. Matsukado said. “They consider it a delicacy.”

  Grace swallowed hard. “Um. Mmm.”

  “They?” murmured Peter.

  Mr. Matsukado continued to brood over the fare. Peter brought the conversation back to their earlier discussion, insisting that he would need twenty-four hours to check for items he had placed into stock.

  “Is it possible you have sold some of these objects?” Mr. Matsukado could not hide his horror.

  “I’m afraid so.” Peter looked apologetic. “After all, the items were purchased to sell.”

  Grace, who knew they had not yet sold any of Mallow’s contents, wondered if Peter was up to something.

  “Worse luck, I’m afraid a number of articles weren’t fit for resale.”

  The Shogun made a strangled sound—as though he had swallowed a bit of grilled eel the wrong way.

  “Mostly rubbish from the thirties and forties,” Peter went on mercilessly. “By the way, who was the character with the mania for Egyptology?”

  “John Mallow,” the Shogun said faintly.

  “John Mallow,” Peter repeated cheerfully. “That’s the bloke.” As his gaze met Grace’s, his lips quirked ever so slightly.

  JohnMallow? Was the John who had written the Shiloh letter the owner of Mallow Farm?

  The meal was followed by brandy and dessert. The dessert, according their glum host, was calledanmitsu. It seemed to consist of beans and a variety of fruit mixed with a sweet pale jelly. After the eel, Grace figured she had nothing to lose and bravely dug in. It was…interesting, she decided, and found herself craving a slice of old-fashioned cheesecake like her mother used to make.

  She had been thinking that it was strange for Mr. Matsukado to reject his own culture in favor of the Anglo-Saxon, but it occurred to her that she, too, was in a sense dissing her heritage in her adulation of all things British. Lately she had begun to long for things she had taken for granted—things like screens on windows, central heating, and passing lanes.

  When the uncomfortable meal was at last finished, Miss Musashi drove them home in the long sedan.

  Behind rock walls and natural high hedges, the shining lakes swept by in the blue moonlight.

  Peter spoke to Kameko in Japanese. She answered softly. Grace noted the glimmer of her smile in the rearview mirror. Whatever Peter had, it apparently translated into every language.

  “I didn’t know you spoke Japanese,” she remarked, as they let themselves into Rogue’s Gallery. The purr of the car’s engine died into the warm night and was replaced by nocturnal sounds: crickets, whispering leaves, and the eerie screech of the barn owl that had recently taken up residence in Peter’s little-used gardening shed. It was only after dark that Grace had a sense of how far from the village Craddock House was.

  Peter cocked his head, and she added, “Oh, right. What I don’t know about you would fill a book.”

  “I rather hope not. One book is quite enough.”

  For the first time, she wondered whether publishing an account of her exploits might draw more snakes from under the rocks in Peter’s past.

  It wasn’t a happy thought. To distract herself, and possibly him, she chattered. “Kameko’s an interesting character, isn’t she? I could picture her as a Bond Girl.”

  “Interesting, yes,” Peter said. “She’s carrying.”

  “Carrying what?”

  He smiled. “A gun. She’s probably Matsukado’s bodyguard as well as chauffe
ur.”

  “Why would he need a bodyguard?”

  “He’s a very wealthy young man,” Peter said dryly. “And as naive as he is pampered.”

  “He knows about the Shiloh letter.”

  Peter sighed.

  “Did you have to agree to sell him back all this stuff?” Her plaint was more routine than heartfelt.

  “I don’t wish my entire inventory tied up in legal tape for the next twelve months. Besides, I’m making close to a quarter of a million on the deal.” He sounded uncharacteristically irritable. “Look, I didn’t tell him about the letter. Keep it if you like.”

  Because the idea was all too tempting, Grace reacted hotly. “That would betotally dishonest! He specifically requested all the papers and books and—”

  “If he already knows about the Shelley, John Mallow’s mention of it isn’t going to help or hinder. Make a copy of the bloody thing. I don’t care.”

  “But what’s the point? If the Shelley exists, it will be somewhere in this pile of…of junk. And it’s all got to go back to Mallow Farm within twenty-four hours.”

  “Then you’ve got twenty-four hours to search for it, haven’t you?” He started up the stairs.

  “Are you serious?”

  Grace gazed into the shadows of the shop. The glass eyes of a slightly moth-eaten teddy bear gleamed at her from the gloom.

  “Are you just going to bed?” she called after him.

  He paused. “I’m going to have a nightcap, and then I am indeed going to bed.” His smile was exaggeratedly lustful. “You’re welcome to join me, old chap.”

  Laughing, she followed him into the upstairs flat, curling comfortably on the long red-leather sofa while Peter poured brandy into snifters.

  It was a spacious room with Georgian windows and polished wood floors. A formal white fireplace stood at one end. There was a huge moon-faced grandfather clock, and several bronze lamps with translucent milk-glass shades cast a warm glow over the room’s jewel-colored Oriental rugs and red-leather chairs. A mounted telescope offered a view of the starry night sky.

  Grace sipped her brandy thoughtfully. “Suppose I did look for the Shelley, and suppose I did find it,” she said at last.

  “Then you would have to decide whether you were going to admit where you found it, or whether you were going to pretend it turned up someplace else.” He raked a hand through his thick, straight, fair hair that immediately fell back across his forehead.

  “Lie in other words. Cheat. Steal.”

  “ ‘Who Dares Wins,’ ” he replied, quoting the Special Air Services motto.

  Not always, Grace reflected. Sometimes those who dared lost big. Peter looked tired. She realized that she had actually forgotten all about Horrible Harry. Though Peter didn’t appear unduly alarmed, the threat of extradition must be weighing on him. At the least, the gendarme’s appearance had to stir up dreadful memories.

  His winged brows drew together. “What’s that for?”

  “What?”

  “The look of melting sympathy?”

  Grace felt her cheeks grow warm.

  He leaned over and kissed her. It was a light and expert kiss. More compliment than seduction, but this was the pattern they had fallen into since the events of the autumn. Peter flirted, made the expected move, and Grace laughingly evaded what she was sure was a kind of reflex with him. She felt certain that when his heart was in it, so to speak, she would know. But sometimes lately she wondered if she wasn’t making a mistake—if they had passed the point of no return, if their relationship had devolved into that of friends rather than potential lovers.

  Isn’t that my luck. The night I’ve been waiting for, the night he finally asks me to stay—and means it—is the night I have to spend prowling through eighteen crates of bric-a-brac, dust, and spiders.

  Peter brushed his knuckles against her cheek, smiled an oblique smile, and said, “Be sure to lock up when you’re finished, love.”

  Downstairs Grace kicked off her shoes, made a cup of tea in the stockroom, and settled down on the wooden floor surrounded by stacks of long out-of-date gardening manuals, magazines, cookbooks. She needed a system, a mode of attack, but there wasn’t time.

  Hurriedly she flipped through the magazines and books.

  A perusal of the enormous family Bible gave her a better understanding of the Mallow family tree—and alerted her to the fact that there had been several John Mallows. Since Peter seemed to have struck a nerve this evening with his comment about “thirties and forties,” she focused on those entries.

  John Mallow, brother to Phillip and David. B. 1916 and D…. nothing.

  Grace studied the tiny meticulous letters.

  No mistake; there was no date of death. Ever. Mallows continued to be born and die, but John Eldon Mallow, born in 1916, appeared to have vanished from the face of the earth.

  That wasn’t the only peculiarity.

  As Grace sifted through sheet music, household account books, photos aged to sepia, and letters—years, and generations, worth of letters—she asked herself why, if John Mallow had mailed this letter, it was still with his possessions.

  It did not take her long to realize her task was an impossible one. Most of the stuff, though haphazardly preserved, was not in any kind of order. Fashion magazines from the fifties were tossed in with livestock journals from the seventies. There were decades of bar chits (the Mallows had evidently been members of the drinking class).

  Poring over hundreds of photos, sorting by costume and hairstyle, she squandered a couple of hours getting familiar enough with the distinctive Mallow features to tell them at a glance from those of their neighbors and in-laws.

  She found several group photos staged in front of Mallow Farm, watching with fascination how the building changed through the decades, how small trees became tall trees, and the paint faded, and trim changed. At last she narrowed a stack from the forties. Three men close in age who looked too similar to be anything but brothers posed in front of the familiar brick and wisteria.John, Phillip, and David read the feminine writing on the back of the photo.

  She singled out another markedJohn, and studied it. There were several others of the lean, dark-haired man with a disreputable-looking terrier. Curiously, she studied the handsome face gravely smiling into the camera lens. In the last photo he wore a khaki uniform and—if she was not mistaken—a cap badge that looked very like the one they had found earlier. She thought that in this final shot he looked older, and there was something indefinably guarded in his expression.

  Grace’s tailbone smarted; she shifted on the hard floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught movement at the side window.

  A tree branch moving in the breeze?

  But there was no breeze on this warm June night.

  Swallowing hard, she stared down at the pile of photos. There it was again, a white blur at the window seeming to float just out of the frame.

  The perfect finish to a bizarre day. Why didn’t I go home when I had the chance?

  With great deliberation she set down the papers she was holding, picked up her mug, checked it, and rose. She walked toward the back room holding the cup out, playacting getting a refill. She hoped from across the room the watcher could not tell her hand was shaking.

  Inside the stockroom she banged the cup on the desk, ran to the shelf that concealed the secret passage leading from the shop to the stairs that led to Peter’s living quarters, and pulled hard.

  The shelf swung out soundlessly.

  Guided by the light of the stockroom, Grace darted up the stairs half-feeling her way. She tripped, but without losing speed continued on in anteater style till she came at last to the wooden panel opening.

  Sliding the panel open, she crawled through the enormous grandfather clock case into Peter’s dark living room. Light shone from his bedroom. She ran on tiptoe, sliding to a stop in his doorway.

  Peter was sleeping, a book on the bed beside him. Even in her distress she realized that she had ne
ver had this advantage before. Never seen him out cold while she was up and alert. His chest was bare, lightly tanned and subtly muscled. She wondered if he was nude beneath the blankets.

  As she realized what a strange time it was to be thinking about such things, she moved to touch his shoulder. He seemed to sense her presence. His lashes flickered, his eyes opened. He sat up although he was clearly not fully awake, his hand going for the drawer of his nightstand.

  Did he keep a gun in there? It seemed to be a night for one revelation after another.

  “Peter, there’s someone downstairs,” she gasped.

  He blinked at her. “Inside?”

  “Outside. Looking in the window.”

  “Ring the cops,” he said, rolling off the bed and pulling on Levi’s in what appeared to be one fluid motion.

  He opened the door to his closet, stepped inside…and vanished.

  4

  After an astonished moment, Grace went to the giant wardrobe, and pushed aside the clothes that smelled of Peter and some wonderfully expensive aftershave. She took in the false back of the wardrobe and the door beyond, which stood wide open. Another secret passage. The house was full of them, but this one was new to Grace. She stared into the bottomless opening.

  It was pitch-black in the passage, like a doorway into the netherworld. Peter had to have eyes like a cat to find his way. Instinctively, she moved forward, listening. His steps faded to ghostly footfalls, and then…nothing.

  Now what? Would he be all right? She tried to think. He had told her to phone the cops. In her entire acquaintanceship with Peter she had known him to do almost anything possible to avoid attracting police attention, but now he wanted her to summon them.

  Clamping down hard on rising panic, she knelt beside the four-poster bed, and dragged the phone out from under it. Fingers shaking, she made the call, and reported a prowler to the official voice on the other end. All the while, she wondered frantically what was happening downstairs. It was so quiet. Too quiet?

  She couldn’t stand it. Ignoring the official request to stay on the line, she left the receiver off the hook and jumped to her feet. Making her way across the unlit living room, she peered out the window, but she could see nothing from the upper story.