Someone to Love Read online

  “Let’s go copy these pages, then send them to my mother. She’ll charm her way into their houses.”

  19

  Jace and Nigh spent the day trying to pretend they weren’t nervous. They played Scrabble—Nigh won—and they wandered about the garden, with Nigh giving opinions about what she’d do to the garden if the house were hers.

  “You like this house, don’t you? If you had a choice, you’d live here, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” she said honestly. “The house is cold, drafty, and it’s full of ghosts. And I’m not talking about just Ann Stuart. I think my mother’s spirit is here and maybe my father’s. Or maybe it’s just me and my memories that are here.” She shivered. “No, I wouldn’t like to live in this house. There’s something else in it too, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “I think it’s the ghost of that damned lady highwayman. I think she did live here and I think her presence is here.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Shall we check the machines again?”

  All day long they’d checked the fax machine, the answering machine, and Jace’s e-mail. His mother kept them posted every step of the way, of who she’d called and what she’d found out. So far, there had been nothing about who Stacy met outside the school.

  They had found out that Stacy had been a very, very unhappy student and mostly kept to herself.

  “I guess that’s why she never told me that she’d spent most of a year in a boarding school,” Jace said. He was doing his best to understand why Stacy had kept such a big secret from him.

  Mrs. Montgomery had called Jace three hours ago and told what she’d found out from the woman who had been the headmistress of the school when Stacy was there. When Stacy entered the school, she had been a newly traumatized person. Her mother had died just months before the term started and she had been sent to live with her father, a man she’d rarely seen in her life. He had just remarried. The man didn’t have time to take care of his expanding business and two needy females. His new wife won out, and Stacy was sent to school in another country.

  “One of the girls I talked to,” Mrs. Montgomery said, “told me that no one knew much about Stacy. She spent the few months she was there in her room.”

  “But there was a man—” Jace began.

  “I’m getting to that, dear,” she said, “but you must be patient. But first of all, I want to know who is there with you. I can hear her breathing on the phone.”

  Nigh jumped away from the telephone as though she’d been burned.

  “It’s the gardener’s boy, Mick,” Jace said.

  “You never could lie well. Who is it?”

  “Got a pen?”

  “Of course.”

  “Look up N. A. Smythe on the ’Net. Spelled S-M-Y-T-H-E. You’ll see all about her. She lives here in Margate, when she isn’t globetrotting, that is, and she’s been helping me with…well, with whatever I need help with.”

  “You sound much better than you did when you left, so tell her thank you from me.”

  “I will,” Jace said, smiling at Nigh. “So now tell me what else you found out.”

  “About three months after she arrived, one of the girls I talked to said that Stacy had changed. She was as secretive and as separate from the rest of the girls as ever, but they saw her smiling now and then. One of the girls said she thought that sometimes Stacy wasn’t in her room all night.”

  Jace raised his eyebrows at Nigh, as he knew she could hear.

  Nigh nodded, yes, this was possible back in ’94.

  “Was she sneaking out to see someone?” Jace asked his mother.

  “They thought so. I think the security of the school was rather lax at that time, which is why the headmistress was dismissed the next year and the current one hired. Is she lax?”

  “Airport security could learn from her,” Jace said. “Can you keep calling and find out what you can? I need the name of the man she was seeing.”

  “Jace, honey, I’ll ask you again: Are you sure you want to find out all this information? You might find out some things about Stacy that you won’t like.”

  “I’m sure. In fact, the more I find out, the better I feel.”

  “I’m not sure I agree with that. Oh! My goodness! I just pulled up your N. A. Smythe. She’s beautiful! And she looks to be intelligent. Well done!”

  “Mom,” Jace said, laughing and embarrassed at the same time.

  “What does the ‘N. A.’ stand for?”

  “Nightingale Augusta.”

  “She should fit right in with our family. Okay, I have to go. I’ll call you when I know more. Or I may send a fax with a name. I love you.”

  “Me too, Mom,” Jace said softly, then hung up.

  The phone didn’t ring again until 1:30, just after lunch. It was his mother and she was yawning. She’d been on the phone and fax and Internet all night, compensating for the time difference in England.

  “I have a name and an address,” his mother said without preamble, “and you’re to go to her house to have tea at four. Her name is Carol Heatherington, and she was Stacy’s roommate.”

  “Her roommate!” Jace said, looking at Nigh in triumph. “Did she give you a name?”

  “No. Carol wants to talk to you personally because she feels very bad about Stacy. She was out of the country when Stacy died or she would have come forward.”

  “She knows that Stacy didn’t kill herself.”

  “No, quite the contrary. Carol thinks that Stacy did kill herself and she thinks she knows why.”

  “That’s what she said?”

  “Yes. Jace, darling, I did warn you that you might find out things you didn’t want to know. You should leave now. I told Carol that you’d be bringing a friend with you. Jace?”

  “Yes,” he said, still reeling from being told that someone who knew Stacy believed that she’d killed herself.

  “I know you have your own mind, but I suggest that you listen to what this young woman has to say. Really listen.”

  “Yeah, okay, sure, Mom,” Jace said listlessly. “I better go. I’ll call you when I get back.”

  “Make it twelve hours from now. I need some sleep.”

  “Thanks for this, Mom. Love you.”

  Mrs. Montgomery gave a jaw-cracking yawn. “Me too. Give my best to Nightingale.”

  “Nigh,” he said. “We shorten it to Nigh.”

  “I look forward to meeting her.” She hung up.

  Nigh looked at Jace. She’d heard enough of the conversation to know what it was about. “I think we should put on our best clothes and go to tea,” she said. She looked at the address Jace had written down. “It will take us a couple hours to get there.”

  Silently, Jace nodded, then went upstairs to change. He didn’t want to give himself time to think about what he was finding out. The reality that Stacy’d had a life that he knew nothing about was at last coming through to him. He knew that from now on, what he found out was going to be difficult for him to hear. Part of him wanted to stop where he was, but the bigger part knew he had to go on.

  “I asked you here today mainly to assuage my own guilt,” Carol Heatherington said. She was young, not very pretty, but she had that English skin that was flawless and she had a presence that only money and breeding could give a person. She had a pretty house set near a river, surrounded by thirty acres of land. Her husband commuted every day to London, leaving her with her horses and dogs and a young child. She seemed utterly content with her life.

  Carol poured the tea into Herend cups. “I’m afraid I wasn’t very kind to Stacy when we were at school. You see, I had requested that I be put in a room with my best friend, but instead I was put in with this angry, sullen American girl. I’m afraid I took out my disappointment on her.”

  Jace grimaced and had to clamp his mouth shut to keep from telling her what he thought of someone who would be unkind to a girl who’d just lost her mother.

  Nigh took the cup of tea. “We’re all bitches at that age,” she