DO YOU BELIEVE? TOR Books ISBN: 0-765-34888-8 May 2005 Get a 20% discount from NewAndUsedBooks

Chapter 2

     Mrs. Bennett hummed around a mouthful of pins. She knelt by the hem of Mrs. Edgar's mother-of-the-bride gown and tucked the blue silk up an inch, slotting pins in with forty-plus years of experience, not really looking or thinking about it.

     Mrs. Edgar took a deep breath. "And then I said no smoked oysters. They're too dear."

     "Please stand still," Mrs. Bennett said.

     "There goes that lovely Vic Drummond." Mrs. Edgar rose on tip-toe to better see the street outside. "You'd never know he was famous, that one. Always has a smile and nod. Took my bag clear up to my door, he did, the other day."

     "Did he?" Mrs. Bennett struggled up from her knees and leaned forward to peer out of the bow window of Stitches. Drummond headed into the Pig and Pie.

     "Am I finished here?" Mrs. Edgar asked.

     "Oh. Yes, luv. Take it off and hang it over the door, will you? There's other work to be done."

     While Mrs. Edgar struggled out of her dress and the heavy undergarment she needed to quell the jiggle of flesh gained from years of serving cream teas to the tourist trade of Marleton, Mrs. Bennett wheeled her bicycle out of the shed behind Stitches.

     She pedaled toward the looming tower of All Saints Church, Alice Drummond's lovely nephew on her mind.

     Rose drove cautiously along the main street of Marleton village, looking for the lane that led to her bed and breakfast.

     Marleton, in the Cotswolds, close to Stratford-Upon-Avon, enjoyed more than its share of tourists. It boasted thirteen pubs, one bona fide tea shop, a Norman church, and more quaint cottages and shops than she could shake a stick at.

     Why hadn't she asked the men at V. F. Drummond's about her sister Joan?

     Because they intimidated you.

     Rose reached the village center with its war memorial. She almost circled the obelisk to return and ask the men if they knew Joan, but once in the flow of tourist traffic, she continued straight.

     Rose scanned the tourists who wandered past shops and pubs.

     Where the heck was Joan?

     Rose found her lane, turned into a crushed-stone drive hemmed in with high hedges that within a few yards widened to a courtyard. Cottages bordered the expanse on one side, a lush orchard of pear trees the other.

     She parked in front of the first cottage.

     "There's irony here, too, somewhere," she said as she ducked past a wooden sign much in need of fresh paint, decorated with entwined roses and thistles.

     She hoisted her backpack over one shoulder and knocked on a door marked "Office."

     The Rose and Thistle Bed and Breakfast was not what she'd expected when she'd arrived that morning. The brochure her sister Joan had left at home pictured a rambling stone "manor house" that could sleep eleven or twelve guests and spoke of cottages—not pictured—that could each sleep two to four.

     The cottages proved to be a disappointment. Rose had pictured quaint buildings, like the one in which V. F. Drummond lived—or stayed—according to the man behind the bar at the King's Head Pub. V. F. Drummond, horror novelist, the bartender said, lived in London but had been staying in Marleton at his auntie's house until such time as he sold it.

     It was expected V. F. Drummond would sell the cottage. Such as he were usually found in London, the bartender had whispered, leaning across the bar and glancing left and right before he breathed his words into Rose's ear as if they were some important state secret. London was where his kind was usually found.

     Came for his auntie's funeral as he should, though. And stayed he had. Been seven months now. Letting the roses get a bit leggy, he was, but otherwise didn't cause any trouble.

     Rose figured V. F. Drummond just needed to give his gardener a kick in the ass, is all. She wondered about the man who could be comfortable with a Beatrix Potter garden and a horror novel imagination.

     Joan's accommodations at the Rose and Thistle were neither quaint nor a cottage, but the end section of what was once a stable block. It had been the calving shed, an idea that didn't bear too much examination.

     Something Rose could not avoid examining was why Joan had suddenly stopped answering e-mail or why she had unaccountably packed up and left the bed and breakfast when she'd paid for the entire month of July.

     Rose knocked again. The proprietor of the Rose and Thistle, Harry Watkins, jerked the door open and frowned at her. Blond and paunchy, Harry looked like the aging coach of Shirt-and-Tie's rugby team.

     "More questions?" he asked.

     "Have you remembered anything else?"

     "Since this morning? No. I told you, your sister left. Saw her drive off, I said." He started to close the door.

     "Wait. Please, Mr. Watkins. This is important. And you thought she was skipping out on the bill—"

     "Spot on. If she hadn't left her check on the table, you wouldn't be staying in her cottage, mind you." He scratched his paunch and glanced behind him toward the sound of a television.

     "She left nothing in the cottage? No clothes?"

     "Are you suggesting something, miss?" Suddenly, Watkins looked less impatient and more belligerent.

     "No, of course not, I'm just trying to find out what happened to her."

     The smile that flickered across his face, and just as quickly disappeared, made Rose's skin crawl.

     "Woman looks like her?" he said. "Probably gone to London. None of her sort around here."

     Rose bit her tongue on a question about what sort Mr. Watkins imagined Joan to be.

     "Is there some place I can check my e-mail?"

     He tipped his head. There was a sheen of sweat on his flushed pink skin. "No. Don't think so."

     "Do you have a computer? I thought my sister found out about the Rose and Thistle through the Internet."

     "We're not on the web. Don't have a computer. Don't see the need. Keep everything up here." He tapped his skull.

     Rose forced herself to thank him and headed for Joan's cottage, crossing a lawn studded with daisies no larger than a dime. Beside each door of the stable block "cottages" stood a planter stuffed with pink impatiens, trailing ivy, and scarlet geraniums. Hers had sprouted a pint of milk, the one Mr. Watkins claimed would be delivered daily for her tea.

     Tea. She shuddered.

     She unlocked the door and entered the cottage for the second time that day. Nothing had changed. No Joan reading on the couch in the tiny living room, or making lunch in the dining-cum-kitchen area. The small bedroom tucked under the eaves still looked bare and unoccupied, white bed linens folded at the foot of the bed.

     The possibility of Joan popping in soon dimmed when Rose placed the pint of milk on the bare shelves of the refrigerator. Or did her sister eat every meal in a restaurant?

     Certainly, there was no breakfast at the Rose and Thistle for cottage occupants. The breakfast part of the bed and breakfast applied only to the manor house guests.

     Rose dropped her backpack on the floor between the two single beds in the downstairs bedroom and unpacked her luggage, a small carry-on suitcase. But when she placed her toothpaste and birth control pills in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom, they looked so forlorn on the shelf, as lonely as the milk in the empty refrigerator, she grabbed them and tucked them away in her backpack.

     The feeling of emptiness did not dissipate as she opened a cardboard carton—something missed by Harry Watkins and found by her in the back of a cupboard filled with brooms and buckets.

     The box was Rose's only evidence that Joan had ever occupied the cottage. Acid surged into Rose's throat. Why had Joan gone off without word to anyone?

     Feeling like a voyeur into her sister's life, Rose dug in the box, strewing the contents across the white duvet.

     The carton contained folders, scraps of paper, and a jumble of pamphlets and brochures about English churches. She perched on the spare bed and examined the folders. The first held neatly typed notes for Joan's current project, a book on religious art, commissioned by the Cotswolds Diocese of the Church of England.

     Photographic essays on esoteric subjects were Joan's specialty. Coffee table books for snobby intellectuals, Rose preferred to call them.

     The second folder held receipts. Unlike the typed notes, the receipts were crumpled, stained, or showed some other evidence of having been carelessly stuffed into a pocket or purse.

     Rose read one, a receipt from Edgar's Tea Shop. Her throat felt thick picturing Joan lavishing jam on scones. According to her e-mail messages, Joan had gained ten pounds since coming to England three months before.

     Rose smoothed each receipt and sorted them by date before tucking them away.

     Dozens of photographs of altar screens, statuary, choir stalls, and gargoyles filled the last folder. The earliest of the photographs was dated nineteen seventy, the latest, this year. Those were Joan's work.

     Joan's photography was in the form of contact sheets. Each sheet was filled with thirty-six tiny snapshots, an easy way to look over images before choosing those that would appear in the book.

     Joan disdained the digital camera, preferring to shoot dozens of rolls of film and accepting a certain amount of waste.

     Even as small images on the contact sheets, Joan's photographs showed they were not just an attempt to capture religious subjects for reference purposes. The pictures were works of art in light and shadow, color and form. A celebration of religious fervor.

     Several altar screens had been photographed a score of times at various times of day, in artificial light and candle glow. The book promised to be visually spectacular.

     If Joan finished it.

     The contact sheets were clipped to a database. Each photograph was neatly catalogued by a reference number, a date, and the church in which the particular piece was found. Some entries had additional notes on the artist who'd made the piece. Two altar screens, Rose read, dated back to the thirteenth century.

     Rose skimmed copies of church documents. They were the start of what Rose knew would be a sizeable collection of information needed by Joan to write the book's text.

     Rose set the folders aside. She picked up a heavy black object, a wide-angle camera lens.

     "Where are you, Joan?" Rose asked, rubbing her thumb over the JE etched on the side of the lens.

     She wrapped the lens in a t-shirt. Before she stuffed it into her camera backpack, she took out the book that had been on the bottom of the carton.

     Do You Believe in Evil? by V. F. Drummond.

Joan was as contemptuous of commercial fiction as she was of digital photography. If she read at all, it was something Rose would call depressing and Joan mind-expanding.

     V. F. Drummond was Great Britain's answer to Stephen King. His book was as unlikely a read for Joan as a romance. Joan didn't believe in happy endings any more than she believed in ghosts and ghoulies.

     Joan's notes filled the margins throughout Drummond's book. She'd marked passages with a yellow highlighter.

     But it was the note on the last page that had scared Rose and sent her to the cottage with the blue door.

     Joan had written, "I believe."

     "That's a load of rubbish," Trevor interrupted, grinning.

     Vic grinned back. "And those objects can pass the evil on to the next owner just as—"

     "More rubbish. I'm picturing a car driving around on its own killing people or an umbrella stabbing—"

     "Stop interrupting. And the car bit's been done. Aren't miracles and goodness attributed to objects owned by the holy? France is rotten with shrines."

     Trevor made a snorting noise.

     "I've a serial killer in the last book who gives his ring to a priest just before execution. The moment the priest puts on the ring, he begins to go through life-altering events, ultimately becoming as evil as the killer."

     "Perish the thought." Trevor finished off his mineral water. "I'm glad I don't have your imagination. It'd keep me awake at night."

     "I'm awake already."

     "Where's the new book heading?"

     "I'm passing the killer's ring onto another victim."

     "You could pass that ring around a long time, but I suppose that's the point."

     Vic saluted his friend with his bottle. "At least until the public bores."

     Trevor stood up. "I better head back to Stratford. I'm assigned this religious symposium on youth crime, you know. Real work, it is."

     "I suppose someone has to protect the holy from having their pockets picked. Sounds tame." Vic hauled himself to his feet as well.

     "No religious event is tame since the Iraqi conflict. And with a royal expected, we're overrun with senior police officers and press. At least I'm safe from evil amidst all that holiness."

     "Maybe. My Aunt Alice would have argued that."

     "I'll miss Alice."

     Vic looked over the burgeoning rows of flowers. His Aunt Alice had taken great pride in her garden and it had been in the garden they'd found her, struck down by heart attack.

     Sixty-one, too young to die.

     Vic opened and closed the secateurs, inspected a spot of rust. It was hard to accept that his aunt was gone. She had viewed his success with wry amusement. And been one of his toughest critics.

     Vic walked Trevor down the garden to the back gate. They shook hands.

     "Get over to Stratford for a bit if you can," Trevor said.

     "Not if the press is about. I'm allergic to publicity."

     Vic watched Trevor walk along a public footpath that ran behind the row of cottages and up to Marleton village proper.

     When Trevor disappeared from view, Vic headed into the cottage. His laptop sat on his Aunt Alice's desk in the sitting room. He turned Rose Early's card over and read it again. Early Photography. King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

     A place far from Marleton, yet she'd come to see him and ask him the one question he was uncomfortable answering.

     He set up a new e-mail message and typed in Rose Early's address. The blank screen with its blinking cursor teased him. His fingers suddenly felt stiff and cold.

     He typed one word, hit send, and snapped the laptop closed.

Continue to Chapter 3 of . . .

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