Ashes to Ashes Read Online Free PDF

made her leap back, slam the door, and stand against it, swallowing her heart back into her chest. Nesting blackbirds, she assured herself. Not an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
    Rebecca rubbed her hands together as much in glee as to warm them. What a place! The corners were subtly curved, the walls met at eccentric angles, alcoves hiccuped at odd places. The ceilings were glorious confections of molded plaster like wedding cakes, and most of the walls were wood-paneled. The house itself was a treasure.
    And had she really seen unique and wonderful artifacts tumbled indiscriminately with pure rubbish, or was she just wishfully thinking herself into hallucination? Even the famous Curle portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, hung on the wall by a bed draped and canopied in crimson silk. Forbes Senior had been a magpie collector, buying on whim and leaving his acquisitions strewn about without any discernible order. Junk, Ray would’ve said, just as Dorothy had. What did he know? This wasn’t his field, it was hers.
    Dun Iain was a modern Pompeii, a labyrinth of walls and rooms and passages drifted with the remains of ancient fires— politics and religion, love and hate. Drifted with the ashes of time, waiting to be sifted by an academic arson team. Campbell and Reid, Rebecca thought wryly. Abbott and Costello.
    Footsteps pattered across the floor of the ballroom. Rebecca looked around but saw no one. She must’ve heard Mrs. Garst’s steps on the staircase. A strange echo, to make the steps appear to be on wood rather than stone, but that’s what it had to be. The steps hadn’t squeaked as hers had.
    It was cold, and so silent she could hear her own pulse in her ears. Coffee, definitely. Rebecca started down the nearest flight of steps, another spiral staircase but not the same one she had come up.
    She passed a back door into the large fifth-floor bedroom, another one into the corresponding room on the fourth, and then a long doorless stretch of curved wall. Tiny windows admitted watery light and an occasional glimpse of the surrounding trees, their dark carnelian contrasting oddly with the muted green of the lawns. There was Dorothy, leaning against the toolshed smoking a cigarette. That’s why she’d abandoned the upper story— break time. She’d certainly made quick work of all those flights of stairs.
    A third door was at the bottom of the cylindrical stairwell. Rebecca opened it, peeked out, and found herself in the far corner of the Hall from the piper’s gallery. All right then. She had it figured out. The building was a fat L-shape. The Hall on the second floor and the ballroom on the sixth extended completely across their respective legs of the L. The smaller rooms were set into the L like building blocks. No need to unroll a ball of string behind her as she’d first feared.
    She strolled down the main staircase, pausing to look quizzically at Mary Stuart’s inscrutable marble smile. Darnley had been sitting on the sarcophagus last night even as funny bumping noises came from upstairs. The hot water pipes, probably. Dun Iain would have made even phlegmatic Ray jump at his own shadow, let alone Michael, or Dorothy, or Rebecca herself.
    She stepped into the brightly lit haven of the kitchen. An enamel kettle simmered on the range. Michael sat at the table, a mug of tea at his fingertips, a book propped against the marmalade jar. Darnley dozed on a chair, paws tucked in, looking like a furry butterscotch and white tea cozy.
    “Good morning,” Rebecca essayed. Her lips stopped before they could form the words “Dr. Campbell”. He simply didn’t have the august air of a Ph.D., even though he looked more domesticated than he had yesterday. His hair was smoothed tidily from his face as if awaiting the powder and ribbon of an 18th century portrait. His sweatshirt was a conservative blue that reflected the blue of his eyes, its chest embossed with a white Saint Andrew’s cross.
    “Good mornin’,” he replied. “I