Diane Davidson - Sticks & Scones

My scalded arm was numb with pain. My feet felt bruised from crashing through the grille. When I reached the side, what was I going to do? Was someone still after me? Wet and chilled to the bone, how would I get through the dark woods that surrounded the castle? I didn’t have a clue.

Swim, dammit. I raised one arm, then the other. The burnt arm wouldn’t obey my mind’s commands, so with great effort, I turned on my side and started an awkward, slow side-stroke. I gasped for breath. Swimming had never been so hard.

Finally, my fingers touched the slimy moat rim. The slippery rock wall, covered with algae, gave me no footing. Wheezing, I grabbed an overhanging aspen branch, only to slide backward into the icy water, gasping. With a huge effort, I hauled myself up on the rocks. One foot in front of the other: Get out of the water; get through the woods, go back to town. Call Boyd. Call the police. Get a grip.

Flee.

I heaved myself over the rock wall and tumbled hard into a bank of snow and leaves. All around, unseen trees rattled and swayed. I couldn’t feel my feet. But I was in snow, I knew that. My burning skin began to sweat and scream with pain.

I glanced back at the castle. The kitchen was lit by an eerie glow that did not come from the sconces or chandeliers. I squinted: There was a figure, a small figure, beside the window, which was once again open. Who was it?

I’d heard a child yell, “Flee, cook!” It had sounded like a girl, and she’d been in Michaela’s overhead rooms, by the murder holes. I peered at the figure, which stood motionless, framed by the open window. Was I dreaming, or was it a young boy wearing a ruff? None of the kids at the fencing banquet had been sporting one of those stiff Elizabethan collars.

Crap, I thought. Either I’m seeing a ghost or I’m losing my mind.

-27-

I turned away from the castle and tried to get oriented. Close by, light from a solitary lamp shone through the pines. I sniffed a putrid smell. Coming from… what? I steadied myself, knelt carefully, and whisked soothing snow up my left arm. I belatedly recalled hungry mountain cougars, who did their hunting at night. Was I soon to become a feline hors d’oeuvre? I laughed aloud. Put that worry out of your head, dummy. The human hunter who stalked me was far more dangerous than any four-footed ones who might prowl through these woods.

I staggered to my feet, almost overwhelmed by the smell of… garbage. Suddenly I realized I stood about half a dozen yards from the castle Dumpster, and the light beside it. I needed to get to help, I knew that. But all my thinking of the evening had not brought resolution to the questions that kept cropping up. When I was very young, my mother’s first act whenever she came home from shopping was to check the garbage. This was especially true if I looked guilty. Had I broken a glass? Burned a pan with popcorn? Eaten forbidden ice cream bars? All the evidence my mother ever needed was in the trash.

I stumbled through the snow and threw open the top to the trash bin. Inside were my tied bags of trash from the labyrinth lunch. I leaned in, snatched them, and tossed them aside. Beneath those bags were two more black garbage bags, tied with yellow plastic ribbons. I ripped into the first one and was rewarded with household trash: aluminum platters and sauce-splattered folding boxes from Chinese carry-out. I leaned out of the bin and took a couple of deep, cleansing breaths.

I heaved myself back up the side of the bin and savagely tore into the final bag. Paint cans. Brushes. And below them, a metal sign and what looked like metal attached to a bunch of wires. I grabbed both, pulled them up, and held them to the light.

The sign said: PUMP ROOM! HIGH VOLTAGE! DO NOT ENTER! DANGER - ELECTRIC SHOCK! The other was an electric lock, complete with dangling wires. One side was blackened.

“Andy!” I gasped. “You got yourself into a real mess, didn’t you, kid?”

I dropped the lock and the chain back into the trash, and tried to figure out where to go. A small service road ran up to the Dumpster. It was slick with ice, but traveling along it would bring me back to the driveway. Think, I ordered myself.

But I couldn’t think: my burned skin felt so hot I flung myself back into the snow. I felt dizzy, swimming against the movement of the earth.

After a few moments, I felt a bit better. I blinked. The blur in my vision had cleared. So what did I need to do? Pretend you’re Dorothy and follow the Yellow Brick Road. Or in this case, the Iced Service Road. My own spontaneous, halfhearted chuckle surprised me. Humor in despair. I heaved myself to my feet and lurched forward.

How far was I from the driveway? A quarter of a mile? Half a mile? Overhead, through the swaying branches, I could just make out the Big Dipper, pointing to the North Star, at the end of the Little Dipper. You can do this. Flee, I told myself.

And I did, clutching my pained left arm. My stockinged feet had turned numb in the snow. I was going to make it, I told myself. Half a mile at the most.

The pine boughs swayed and creaked. Who had done this to me? The answer remained tantalizingly elusive: someone in the Great Hall, someone who saw me read Eliot’s pamphlet, perhaps, someone who had followed me to the chapel and watched from afar as I’d scraped the new paint off the incriminating arc, the arc of electricity made where a young man had been electrocuted. Had it been Michaela? And if so, who had attacked her and rescued me? What had really happened back there?

My mind spun: Flee, cook! We tried to warn you not to come! I’d looked up into a face, with blond hair.

Andy had broken into a playroom, a playroom guarded by an electrified lock. I don’t hate him, Michaela had said. Quite the opposite … The electric-locked playroom had been cheaply furnished, and the toys had been old, but not covered with dust.

The only dangerous place in the castle is the moat pump room, Sukie had said. But don’t worry, it’s all locked up. Was the room without a pump truly dangerous? Or was it locked to keep Our Lady Swiss-Clean out?

Tonight, I’d seen the face of a child, a little girl, I was almost sure. I was almost sure I’d heard that girl attacking my attacker, up in Michaela’s apartment.

There was a child-a living, nonghostly little girl - in Hyde Castle.

The rumor of the baby drowning in the well had been just that: a rumor, started in a deliberate attempt to ward off the curious. And what about the screaming in Hyde Chapel? There hadn’t been any ghost of a dead wife, I realized. The real child had been crying; maybe she had been hiding in the chapel storeroom when the ill-fated wedding had started. Eliot could have put together his whole tape-and-player show to cover up for it.

So Eliot had to know. He had to know something. He had to know why and how Andy had been electrocuted. Did he also know who had murdered Andy? Or had Eliot murdered Andy?

I was nearing the driveway. I had to be. But I couldn’t hear cars from the state highway, only the moaning of the trees. Of course Eliot knew. Poor Andy had broken into the chapel - not the chapel where the stamps were hidden, but the castle chapel where the child was hidden, in its playroom… behind an electric lock and a sign saying that it was a pump room, to keep Sukie out.

But whose child… ?

Stories in town had him living like a hermit in one room of the castle.

For how long had Eliot lived like that? From the time he lost his teaching position on the East Coast to the time he met Sukie, almost nine years had passed. He’d had at least one girlfriend during that time: Viv Martini. That relationship hadn’t lasted long, according to Boyd.

The family of the original fencing-master; meanwhile, had been given permission to live in a section of the castle rent-free …