The Irish Manor House Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

Rowena that, her health and vitality? How could he not?
    Scott looked up. “Hello, Ma.” He was separating catalogs from the regular family mail. “Smells like something with curry.”
    “Pea soup. Where’s your muffler? The new one, the brown that I knitted, there’s such a chill in the air. And wind. Leaves blowing all about.”
    “My muffler? Don’t know, Ma. Last I saw, Rowena was wearing it. Sneaking out of here early this very morn, her worn-out parka and the muffler, old brogues. Looked like a refugee from War and Peace. ”
    “Rowena here? This morning?” She felt somehow betrayed. “What’s going on, Scott? Two conflicting … My father saying he was out riding and his stirrup broke and he fell off of Thor. And Inspector O’Hare’s different version. And Rowena last night in jail! What’s going on, Scott? If a mother may be so bold as to ask?”
    “Hmmm?” Scott was tapping the pile of catalogs on the the table to even them, his fair-haired head bent down. “Am I my sister’s keeper?”
    “Scott!”
    He looked up, contrite. “Sorry, Ma. My wicked tongue. But I was in Dublin. I got home late last night. Haven’t got it straight yet, that meadow affair.”
    Caroline felt a familiar apprehension. In Dublin. One of those parties. A lot of drinking, gay young men, some nights not even coming home. It had started two years ago. Where did he get the money? He had no money of his own, no job, only the small royalties she’d made over to him, royalties from his late father’s guitar recordings. So where did the money come from? She looked at the catalogs in his thin fingers. Catalogs for the expensive things he bought lately: the Renaissance lyre chair for his rooms at Ashenden Manor, gifts of perfume and leather and recordings for friends who were young men Caroline had never met. And having his favorite books specially bound by Erasmus House in Geneva.
    She put a hand vaguely to her hair as a wisp fell across her eyes. Her poor Scott. She hardly dared think what she suspected.
    “Ma?”
    She looked at him blankly. She was seeing a morning twenty-two years ago, when Scott was born and she looked down at him in her arms and sensed that something was wrong and felt danger like a dark halo around his still-damp head.
    “Maybe at lunch,” Scott was saying, and his tone was gentle, “we’ll ask your pa, the good Dr. Ashenden. He’ll sort it all out for us, don’t worry. All right?”
    “Yes, darling,” Caroline said, with total disbelief. “Your grandfather will explain it. That’s best.”
    *   *   *
    Scott watched his mother cross the hall. His gleaming little red Miata convertible was parked outside on the gravel near the stable. He longed to escape the ordeal of Saturday lunch. These hellish weekend lunches. Charlatan! The word, so contemptuous, though not actually spoken aloud, was in the curl of his grandfather’s lips and in the angry glare of his dark, heavy-lidded eyes when Ashenden looked across the soup and noontime cold meats at the thickly built, fifty-year-old Dr. Mark Temple. That Ashenden’s daughter Caroline had married a chiropractor! Fakes, all of them! A travesty to call them doctors. It made for a disagreeable and indigestible lunch. Scott had heard his grandfather expound on the subject of Dr. Mark Temple, ranting to his friend Padraic Collins one evening in the study, “The Ashenden name, damn it! Associated with that bone man’s name!” Outrageous that he, Dr. Gerald Ashenden, whose name was preceded in medical journals and weekly newsmagazines by the word eminent, now had a son-in-law who pushed around people’s bones. In Ashenden’s view, Mark Temple had pushed around Caroline’s bones in his expensive office in Dublin, full of charts of people’s spines, until he had pushed her into marriage. Caroline believed totally in Dr. Mark Temple, who presumably adjusted her bones and who massaged her neck and back and limbs. “Believes in him! Damned fortune