"Papa, no!" Miss Warburton screamed as the Colonel swung the Webley towards Shizuru. Her shout made him hesitate just before the gun was in position to fire, which made me hold up as well.
"Laurel?"
"These are my guests, Papa, not intruders! They've only just arrived this evening!"
He stared at her, wild-eyed and trembling, then fell back from the emotional precipice. His eyes dimmed; he sagged back to the chair and let the revolver drop with a thud to the desktop.
"Of course, of course," he muttered, almost under his breath. "I know better than to..."
He didn't finish the sentence, at least not aloud. I palmed the derringer and slipped it back into my pocket, hoping that neither Warburton had seen it. An armed standoff was not the best way to introduce oneself. The incident, though, pretty much settled my mind on the question of the Colonel's sanity.
Warburton reached for the glass, lifted it, saw that it was empty, and pushed himself up out of the chair and went over to the sidebar. He picked up a decanter, filled the tumbler half-full, and downed the contents in one gulp. The trembling ebbed almost at once, the alcohol dulling the shadows in his mind, though perhaps just setting the stage for new ones. Gathering himself, he turned back to us.
"I apologize for that display. It was an unforgivable lapse, and I can only say that my private affairs are...troubled," he finished lamely. Miss Warburton hastened to fill the void.
"Papa, these are Miss Viola and Miss Kuga, from London. Ladies, this is my father, Colonel Warburton."
"From London, you say? And what brings you ladies to Devonshire?"
Miss Warburton seemed to hesitate, but Shizuru spoke up at once.
"Your daughter is concerned about you, Colonel. I am a specialist in these matters."
"A...specialist? A doctor, you mean?" he snapped suspiciously, bristling at the obvious implication.
She shook her head.
"No, Colonel, not an alienist. Miss Warburton believes in you. I am an inquiry agent."
He regarded her doubtfully.
"A detective? That presumes that there is something to detect."
"Given that you just pointed a gun at her, you seem to think there is," I noted. Miss Warburton's startled expression said that she wasn't impressed by my plain speaking.
"I...thought that it was possible, once, but I was just fooling myself." His hand tightened on the glass. "My daughter is a kind girl, but...this is something that can't be solved with...with footprints or cigar-ash. How can you hope to detect things that can't be touched, that are there and then gone?"
"What is it that you see?" Shizuru asked.
"That's..." Without warning, his temper flared up again. "It's none of your concern! I didn't ask you to come around here, prying into my private affairs! I won't have it, do you hear me? I won't! Prying, snooping interlopers, never letting well enough alone...Damn it, why can't you just leave me in peace?"
Roaring, he spun and hurled the empty glass; it struck the wall next to the diamond-paned casement window and shattered into a rain of glittering shards.
"Just leave me be!" he repeated, half-sobbing, half-screaming. He reeled away from us and beat his fists on the spines of some of the heavy books on the shelf.
"I'm very sorry," Shizuru said quietly, even though I doubted that the Colonel was necessarily talking to us at all by that point, and we retreated from the room. Miss Warburton looked nearly as distraught as her father as she closed the study door behind us. It was no wonder; to have to share that kind of experience with complete strangers must have been awful for her.
"Papa," she whispered sorrowfully, pressing her hand against the closed door for a moment before turning sadly away.
"I...I fear that I have brought you on a fool's errand, Miss Viola. This...I can no longer hide from the truth."
Shizuru shook her head.
"As you said before, he is clearly under a great strain. That cannot be denied. What is still in question is why he is in that condition. If he is haunted only by the shadows of his own mind, then there is nothing we can do; it would be a matter for an alienist. But when you wrote to me, you did so believing that there was some outside cause, some person or thing that has driven him to this. If we can find that cause and remove it, then it may be possible to bring him relief."
"Do...do you really think that...it's possible?"
Shizuru's gentle smile never wavered.
"I think that one should never lose hope without evidence proving that you should. without hope, what do we have?"
I frowned at that. My own experience didn't exactly run in that direction, but when Shizuru said it, it was hard to argue against. Nor was I going to throw cold pragmatism in Miss Warburton's face by pointing out that when a man turned to that kind of drinking, starts pointing weapons at his guests, and has such erratic fits of rage as that, merely finding out that he had good reason for his fears wasn't necessarily going to help him climb out of the hole he'd dug himself.
And who knew? People could recover. Drunks sometimes did put away the bottle, and the disturbed regain their sanity.
"Thank you," Miss Warburton said. After a pause, she went on. "You both must be tired and hungry after your trip down from London. Dinner will be served soon; I'll show you to your rooms, so you can refresh yourselves and dress before we eat."
"Thank you very much."
A side corridor away from the hall led to the Grange's guest bedrooms; we had been placed next to one another. My Gladstone and Shizuru's luggage had already been brought up. Miss Warburton indicated the location of the guest bathroom, told us that we'd be able to meet Dashiell and Dr. Brayle at supper, and then left us to our own devices. I was glad of it, since it gave me the chance to talk with Shizuru without anyone else around.
"Ara, aren't you going to dress for dinner?" was the first thing she said, though, even as she selected a cream-colored frock from her luggage.
"I can eat in pants as well as in skirts," I replied bluntly.
"Natsuki is a law of etiquette unto herself?" she teased, smiling at me.
"You've seen my luggage," I admitted. "You know I didn't pack a dress. I didn't expect formal dining when I left London."
The impish glint in her eyes told me that she'd known it very well, but had just gone on to tease it out of me. It was partly my own fault, I supposed; I hated to admit being at a loss and could end up blustering futilely to avoid it. Shizuru sometimes found that terribly amusing, for some reason.
"Could we talk about the case now?" I groaned. The humor vanished from her expression at once.
"There isn't much to talk about yet. It really is as I told Miss Warburton. Either the Colonel is suffering from delusions, or he's genuinely seen something." She put a fingertip to her lower lip. "The recent death of his wife could have been the tipping point in his mind. Perhaps he imagines it is her spirit, back from the grave."
"Why?"
"To take him with her, to punish him for some imagined or real indiscretion, or because she cannot find peace? There are any number of possibilities, whether the apparition is genuine or imagined, and that's only if it is his wife he sees."
I was focused on another part of what she'd said.
"Shizuru, what do you mean by 'genuine or imagined'? You're not saying that you think there could be a real spirit here?"
"If there was such a thing, this would certainly be the place for it. I can only imagine the effect it would have, living here for decades on end."
"Maybe so, but ghosts?"
"I didn't say that, Natsuki. By 'genuine,' I only meant that the Colonel sees something that actually exists, not a phantasm of his mind. What it is could be a number of different things."
"Miss Warburton said 'that devilish woman' in her letter, but I hadn't heard anything about that since we came here."
Shizuru sighed.
"Of course you have, Natsuki. She told us that he rigorously questioned, then later discharged the female staff. The Colonel himself verified it when he challenged us, demanding to know if we were 'the devils' that tormented him. Quite clearly the apparition, whatever it may be, comes in feminine guise."
Most of the time when Shizuru explained things I was impressed by her deductive abilities. This time, though, I felt like kicking myself for missing the obvious. And, of course, Shizuru just had to notice immediately.
"Natsuki," she said, gently touching my forearm, "it isn't something to reproach yourself over. I know that you are giving up time to spend on a valuable personal matter to help me; you cannot help but be preoccupied. I could hardly devote my best efforts to a case if I were caught up in a more important problem. Only..."
"Yeah, I kind of knew there'd be a 'but' in there."
"I'm not trying to chide you. I only want you to be aware that there is danger here, and I do not want you so lost in your own thoughts that you don't realize it."
I chuckled.
"Yeah, well, staring down the barrel of a service revolver is a pretty good reminder that there's danger."
Shizuru shook her head.
"That is not what I meant. There is an atmosphere over this house, of which I am afraid the Colonel's madness is only a symptom rather than the cause. The emotions run deep beneath the surface here, whether the apparition be a spirit or something worse."
"You make dinner with these people sound so appetizing."
"I doubt it will be as bad as all that, but I do look forward to meeting the rest of the players in this drama." She looked back over her shoulder at me. The impish grin was back, so I braced myself. "Would Natsuki be willing to play lady's-maid for me?"
I snorted.
"The eminent London specialist can't dress herself?"
"Those of us who choose to properly follow social etiquette can't always expect to do for themselves."
"So what were you going to do if I wasn't here?"
"I'd assumed that I could borrow the services of a maid from this household."
"Lucky I did come, then, since the Colonel sacked them all. I can't exactly see Ashworth or the driver doing up your stays."
"No, that would be a bit much," she agreed.
My inept fumbling with laces and hooks managed to get Shizuru out of her traveling dress and into her dinner gown. She then sat down at the vanity, took down her hair so that it spilled across her shoulders, and worked it back up into a subtly different style, less rigorously contained against the jostling of travel. Shizuru had beautiful hair, I thought, thick and glossy with a hint of a curl and that ranged in color from a deep gold through a rich bronze to a soft brown depending on the light. In a way I envied her. From what I remembered I pretty much looked like my mother all over again except for the color of my eyes. Her looks were all I had of her, though; I knew almost nothing of her history, her culture, her language, what had brought her to England, nothing at all.
No, it wasn't "in a way"--I did envy her. Clearly someone had taught Shizuru about her Japanese side. I assumed it was her mother, since her last name was Italian, but even if she didn't have that, she'd had some connection, some background.
She wasn't missing part of herself.
Shizuru must have seen my expression in the mirror, or noticed a change in posture, something, anyway, that gave away my feelings, because she stopped in the middle of putting a hairpin in place and turned to look at me with worried eyes.
"Natsuki? Is something wrong?"
Some part of me wanted to tell her, to open up and let everything pour out. That wasn't something I was used to feeling. Our entire friendship--hell, the reason I even considered her a friend--was based on her respect for my privacy, the fact that she didn't try to poke and prod into the depths of my heart. That was how I wanted it.
It was Porlock's information, of course, that had done this. The name Michael West, the trip out to visit him, it had ripped the scab off the old wound, called all the ghosts out into the present. Here, in this bleak house on this gloomy moor, I felt their presence more strongly than ever.
But I couldn't say anything. I couldn't. Bad enough Shizuru had caught me out this way. My pride couldn't take it if I gave in any more to her.
"This house," I said. "It reminds me of...old ghosts." I managed to put my belligerent face back on again and looked around myself. "Seriously, what is this place, the bloody Castle of Otranto? It's like somebody built it for the purpose of inviting in spooks." That was better. More comfortable. Now I didn't need to give away anything else.
Just like Colonel Warburton.
"Shizuru," I suddenly asked, "why doesn't Warburton tell anyone what he's afraid of? Whatever this apparition is, whatever he sees or thinks he sees, it's driving him mad. He's got family here, a daughter, a brother-in-law, a trusted servant, people he could turn to for help. Why not take them into his confidence?"
"Doesn't Natsuki know?"
A line like that, I'd have expected to see her teasing, cat-grin with it, but not this time. Maybe she felt that a tease would hit too close to home, or--I gave up in disgust; the day that I understood how Shizuru's mind worked would be the day I opened my own detective agency.
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do. Pride, maybe--the head of the family, the old soldier not wanting to confess to his dependents that he's faced with something he can't handle. Of course, they can hardly miss it at this point."
"That is one possibility," Shizuru agreed.
"What's another?"
"Fear."
"Eh? You mean, that he was scared of the ghost or whatever it was?"
And with that, her smile was back.
"Not precisely, but...in a way."
"What does that mean?"
The smile was as enigmatic--and as frustrating--as ever.
"Natsuki will have to wait and see."
I gritted my teeth at her easy refusal. In the mysteries I loved to read, the detectives always chose to hold back the solution until the last moment, whether because pride made them want to present a complete case or because they didn't want to accuse without proof, especially where the powerful were concerned. Shizuru, on the other hand, insisted on doing it solely for the purpose of teasing me! I couldn't understand what she found so entertaining about watching me try and fail to catch up with her mind.
It wasn't until quite a bit later that I also realized that my irritation with her teasing had driven the shades of the past back into the corners of my mind where they usually lurked.
Much too late to thank her.
But then, she'd probably known that, too.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A/N: Just in case anybody missed it, the "Doesn't Natsuki know?" was because Natsuki asked Shizuru why Warburton didn't take his family into his confidence immediately after she, Natsuki, refused to take Shizuru into her confidence about her own personal issue. As in, "you just did it yourself, so you ought to know why he did, too."