Stranger on the Shore - lanyon Josh (лучшие книги читать онлайн бесплатно TXT) 📗

“What about your father?”

Chloe drew back and stared at him. “Wow. There you go again. A tad insensitive, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

“Yes. As you’d know if you’d done your research.”

“I did do my research. I couldn’t find anything out about your father.”

“That’s because it’s a big fat mystery. My mother has never said who my father was.”

He stared at her. She stared back. She wasn’t kidding.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

Chloe smiled with a hint of malice. “Pierce told us at dinner about you falling off the bridge last night. We all had a good laugh.”

“Yeah, I’m still laughing,” Griff said. He smacked the side of his head as though trying to get water out.

Chloe laughed and shot away.

Griff continued his walk up to the house. He could see Marcus on one of the distant lawns using it as a putting green. Head bent, Marcus methodically and neatly sank ball after ball into a hole in the otherwise unblemished grass. He was still swinging as Griff passed him.

Mrs. Truscott, the one-woman welcome committee, opened the mud porch door to his tentative knock. Her lips parted but then she folded them tightly. He understood her dilemma. As irritating as it was to be rushing to answer doors, she would find it more aggravating were he to waltz in as though he was a member of the family. And in fact, it was for Mrs. Truscott’s benefit that he was still knocking and requesting admission even after Jarrett had given him the run of the place.

“They’re still at breakfast,” she said grudgingly.

“Okay. Actually I was hoping to have a look at the nursery. If it is still the nursery?”

Her dark eyes got a strange, faraway look as though she was looking inward at something troubling. She said, “It’s still the nursery. But no child has slept there since.”

“I thought it might be less...I thought maybe it would be simpler if I asked you to show it to me.”

Mrs. Truscott’s eyes narrowed, but maybe she realized that he was up to nothing more sinister than trying to spare Jarrett the pain of walking into that room.

“All right then,” she said. “Come with me.”

He followed her into a kitchen that was roughly the size of his entire apartment. The room was very warm after the cold spring air and it smelled wonderfully of baked bread and coffee and bacon. Maybe he was making a mistake forgoing breakfast at the main house in favor of cornflakes.

Mrs. Truscott was moving briskly so Griff only had a quick impression of towering shelves laden with old china and gleaming pots and pans, stacked stainless steel ovens like you might see in a restaurant, an industrial-sized freezer, and sinks large enough to bathe in. A young, very round and very short woman in what looked like army boots and an apron stood at a table twice the size of most kitchen islands. She was flattening dough with a rolling pin, but she looked up and spared Griff a brief smile.

“This way,” Mrs. Truscott said as though she expected him to try and snitch a cookie.

Mrs. Truscott was moving fast for a woman of her age—granted, it was difficult to pinpoint what that exact age might be, but she was not young. Clearly she wanted to get this trek up marble staircases and down walnut paneled halls over as quickly as possible. In a weird way, so did Griff. In fact, he had put off seeing the nursery for this very reason. He wasn’t sentimental, but he wasn’t insensitive either. Something about seeing this room, the actual crime scene, made him uncomfortable.

He puzzled over it as they hurried along. He was missing a good opportunity to ask Mrs. Truscott some questions about the household staff back then, but he couldn’t seem to think of anything. All he could concentrate on was his own growing unease.

For God’s sake, he wasn’t going to have another anxiety attack over this, was he? He’d seen a photograph of the room—the same photograph over and over in all the magazines and newspaper articles—so he knew full well there was nothing disturbing to see. Certainly no blood spatter patterns, no crime scene outline, no...nothing. Those things didn’t unduly upset him anyway.

It was just a room. A room no longer in use.

They stopped before a closed panel door. The surface was dark glossy wood. The glass knob looked like very pale sea glass. Mrs. Truscott glanced at Griff and then away.

“They left everything just as it was,” she said. Her voice sounded strained. She opened the door.

His first impression was of sunlight. Bright spring sunlight cascading through large windows and glinting off the brass mobile of tiny galleons cresting the sudden disturbance in the air. Warm sunshine bounced off the wooden floorboards and fluffy sheep-shaped rugs. The furniture was heavy and old-fashioned, but it had been repainted in cheerful white and pale yellows and greens—all but the walnut crib, which was clearly an heirloom. In fact, every piece in the room was probably an heirloom, but only the crib had been left untouched.

“Chloe slept in the crib,” Mrs. Truscott said. “Brian’s bed was over here.”

Griff turned to the small bed with its pseudo-pirate ship frame, but he barely registered more than the amiable Jolly Roger over a headboard that looked like the miniature stern of a galleon.

He was still absorbing Mrs. Truscott’s words. “Chloe was in the room that night?”

“Yes.”

“She was in the room, lying in her crib when Brian was taken?”

“Yes.”

Griff stared at Mrs. Truscott. “But that was never in any news report or article.”

“I can’t help that.”

“But the police had to know?”

“I have no way of telling what the police did or didn’t know,” Mrs. Truscott said tartly. “Chloe was in her crib and Brian was in his bed.”

This was surely a vital piece of information, and yet Griff couldn’t seem to see its relevance. The kidnapper had the choice of two children and had taken Brian. Was that because an infant was more trouble? But trouble was relative. From one perspective an infant was less trouble than a small, active boy. And if the original intent had never been to return the victim, then which child was more trouble was irrelevant.

Why Brian and not Chloe?

Surely the answer to that would go a long way to identifying the kidnapper?

Griff slowly circled the room. There was a fireplace and a rocker in one corner. A toy box shaped like a treasure chest sat at the foot of Brian’s bed. A gigantic hutch was filled with picture books and stuffed animals and other old-fashioned toys like tops and jack-in-the-boxes. A sailboat the size of a small chair rested beside the window seat. One wall at the end of the room was covered in old-fashioned white-and-yellow stripes. The other walls were painted white—with the exception of a full-sized mural of the ocean. Colorful fish and dolphins swam and frolicked on the painted turquoise waves.

“She painted that,” Mrs. Truscott said.

And Griff had no doubt “she” was Gemma. It was interesting how everyone spoke Gemma’s name in a certain respectful tone of voice, as though she had been the victim, as though she had been the one who had never returned that night.

But that was the truth, wasn’t it?

Brian’s parents had been victims every bit as much as Brian. And yet no one really talked about Matthew. It was always “Gemma” or “she” in that hushed tone as though everyone was eternally attending Gemma’s funeral.

The focus of the mural was a giant and genial-looking dark green sea monster. Its wide smile revealed many, many sharp white teeth, but his big purple eyes were kind and friendly. The pupils of his eyes were two stars...

Griff reached out to steady himself on the hindquarters of a giant wooden giraffe. He felt as though a great wind were rushing through his head, the roar of a hundred howling voices growing louder and louder, coming closer and closer.