Treasure Box Page 0,73

didn't have one. But while she was with me, there were lights. There was food. Furniture. Everything clean and elegant. We sat down to breakfast - even though it was lunchtime - we ate in the library. No broken window. And eight of us at table. Grandmother - that's all that Madeleine ever called her - and... let's see if I can remember... me and Mad, of course, and then Uncle Stephen, Aunt Athena - no, her real name was Minerva - and Simon and Cousin Jude and Uncle Paul."

"Paul?" asked Chief Bolt. His voice sounded different. "There was a Paul who lived here."

"You know him?"

"I saw him a couple of times when I was a child. At the town Christmas party. The Easter egg hunt on the lawn out front."

"Really? What was he like?"

"Short," said the chief. "He was a toddler. He died when he was about a year and a half old."

"Must not be the same Paul," said Quentin.

"You went out to the graveyard," said the chief. "Let's go out there again. Let's look around."

"You got the heat turned on out there?" But the chief was already heading up the stairs. Quentin followed.

The snow was big flakes now, a Christmasy kind of snow instead of the nasty drizzly snow that had been falling earlier. All the old footprints were gone. But the chief seemed to have memorized Quentin's route through the graveyard.

"like you're trying to catch someone at first, big strides," said Bolt. "And then you see there's nobody in here and you have to see if there's any other way out, or if they climbed over the fence - am I right?"

"Dead on."

"And then you start looking at the headstones. I checked every single one you stopped at. Simon, Minerva, Jude, Stephen."

"I noticed the coincidence," said Quentin. "But the dates were impossible."

"See this one?" He pointed out the grave of the infant Paul who had died at the age of a year and a half.

"Yeah, I saw it," said Quentin.

"Paul was Rowena's brother. She never knew him, though. He was older, and he died a couple of years before she was born. But she came here a lot, to look at his grave."

"Grim," said Quentin.

"After I kissed her that time, after she was sure I was in love with her, she told me a secret. The reason why she wanted to get away from this house."

Quentin said nothing. This was obviously a very difficult memory for Chief Bolt - he was trembling, and his voice was thick with emotion.

"She told me her brother had been murdered."

Quentin felt a chill run through him.

But the chief wasn't done yet. "She told me her mother killed him."

What a wonderful family, thought Quentin. Grandmother, with blood on her hands.

"I take it you never arrested Mrs. Tyler for the crime," said Quentin.

"I didn't believe her. I told Rowena that she must have overheard something and misunderstood it. What evidence did she have, I asked. How could she possibly know something that happened before she was born? And she just looked at me and said, 'I know what I know, Mike.' "

"And?"

"And when I didn't believe her, she didn't see me anymore. She wasn't in the kitchen when I finished my day's work. I hung around each day, waiting. Came early and stayed late. Worked especially hard, but I never saw her."

"She hid from you?"

"I couldn't even ask, because if I asked that would imply that I had some right to ask, and I was the gardener's assistant, for Pete's sake. But I didn't have to ask, I knew what she was telling me. After a couple of weeks I quit and became a cop in Albany, which was a bigger city than I wanted to live in, and after a couple of years the job I've got now was open and they hired me and I came back and I just couldn't stay away from this house, I'd stop by here and Mrs. Tyler would talk to me and tell me news about Rowena and how she was sorry I just missed her. And then she got married and I told you the rest."

"Do you believe her now?"

"I was five when Paul Tyler died. But I looked it up in the library. The Mixinack paper was a daily in those days and the story filled the front page for a week. A real tragedy. The chauffeur backed over the baby. Didn't see him toddle behind the car after he started it up."

"Doesn't