Savage Beauty - Peggy Webb Page 0,27

air, grew stronger and more fierce until they filled the entire room.

Lily jerked upright. “Is someone there?” Or had she made the sounds in her sleep.

The room was quiet now. Groggy and uncertain, she peered around. It was pitch black, the curtains firmly closed against the night. Not even a night light relieved the darkness.

Lily.

Was that a whisper or a draft from the vents stirring the curtains?

“Who’s there?” She reached for the lamp, miscalculated the distance, and her cell phone went flying off the nightstand. It landed with a soft thud on the carpet.

She scrambled around until finally she found both the light switch and her phone, which had skittered under the bed. But there was nothing to see except her dressing table and the French provincial desk in the corner.

Wait. When she’d come back from that awful ritual with Stephen in the library, she’d stopped to tell Annabelle about working in the greenhouses, and then she’d done some work at the desk. But she hadn’t left her chair pulled back like that.

She went to the desk, and there, tucked underneath her heart-shaped paperweight was a slip of ruled paper, torn from a notebook of some kind. It contained one line, written with pencil in a shaky hand.

Death devours all lovely things.

She grabbed slippers and robe, stuffed the note in her pocket and slipped out. The hallway was dimply lit by ancient wall sconces that gave her the shivers. She intended to replace them, but never before had they reminded her of something she might see in Dracula’s castle.

Suddenly she glimpsed a shadow against the massive door going into the east wing. The shadow looked up, pale-faced and indistinct, ghost-like, and then it darted down the stairs.

“Wait!” Mindful of the sleeping household, Lily quickly moved in that direction. “Stop. I want to talk.” She took the stairs two at a time.

“Go away.” The whisper was harsh, filled with bitterness and something else, some deep emotion Lily couldn’t identify.

“Toni? Is that you?”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

The older woman scurried into the kitchen with Lily right behind her. “I’m not going to question why you keep going in and out of a locked door into rooms that are filled with nothing but dusty old records.”

Toni sank into a chair, dropped a large old-fashioned key onto the table and lit a cigarette. “I used to live in the east wing. Some things that belong to me are still there.”

That would explain the key and the ramblings. “I see,” Lily said. She would love to know more, but she wasn’t about to ask questions. She hated people prying into her business and made a point never to poke around in somebody else’s affairs.

Toni waved away a fog of smoke. “Don’t tell Clive and Stephen about this.”

“I won’t.” Smoking was not allowed in Allistair Manor. Though Lily didn’t smoke, it was one of the many rules she was coming to despise. “I’m going to make tea. Do you want something to drink?”

“Anything but hot chocolate.”

Lily almost gave her a high five. Had Toni hated the rules and rituals that were beginning to get under Lily’s skin? She steeped tea in a silence that felt almost companionable. “Cream and sugar?”

“Black.” As Toni drank her tea, her expression was a study in sorrow. Though no lines had dared touch her face, had regret carved a hollow place in her soul? How could you leave behind a child and watch a sick husband go to hole up in Switzerland without feeling as if you’d lost the best part of yourself?

Lily pulled the note from her pocket and slid it across the table. “What do you make of this?”

Toni glanced down at the paper. “Where did you get it?”

“In my room.”

“Someone came into your room?” Lily nodded, and the woman turned as white as the note paper. “Did you see who it was?”

“No. I was asleep.”

Toni read the note, and then she covered her mouth with her hand.

“Toni? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“The note. It’s a line from ‘Passer Mortuus Est’ by the poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

“But what does it mean?”

“I don’t know.” Toni grabbed her key and stood up so fast her chair almost toppled. “I have to go.”

“Wait. Was it that crazy old woman from the garden? Does she prowl the house, too?”

Stephen’s mother never checked her speed, just left the kitchen with her head ducked as if she expected something monstrous to jump out of the shadows at any minute.

Though it was barely