“No kidding!”
Alex laughed, then Matt smiled and reached across the seat to open the door. I climbed in.
We drove to a street of Victorian homes that faced the college campus, stopping in front of a tall white house with green shutters and a wraparound porch. Alex hopped out on the passenger side, then leaned on the edge of my door.
“Would you go out with me?” he asked.
I didn’t expect the question. “Um. .” I started to turn toward Matt.
Alex reached up and caught my face lightly with his hand.
“You don’t need his permission, do you?”
“I guess not.” I heard my cousin’s seat squeak. “It’s just that I’m not here for very long, and I don’t want to screw up the friendship you guys have.”
“If Matt doesn’t like me going out with you, then he’s screwing up the friendship, right?”
I thought about it, then smiled. “Right. So when?”
“Thursday night? We don’t have school Friday and there’s a big party at Kristy’s.”
“Oh, no, sorry. Sophie and I are going to a movie.”
He looked surprised. “Can’t you change it? I thought girls had a rule that when one of them got asked for a date, all other plans were off.”
“I don’t go by that rule.”
Behind me Matt laughed, a little too loudly, I thought.
“It’s not fair to the other person,” I explained. “Especially Sophie. She’s got enough to do with school and work. I don’t want to change plans on her.”
“You mean Sophie Quinn?” Alex asked. “We used to be best buddies when we were in grade school. Why don’t the four of us go to the party-you, me, Sophie, and Matt?”
Now I did turn to my cousin.
He shrugged. “Okay with me.”
“I’ll ask Sophie what she wants to do,” I told Alex, though I was pretty sure she’d be thrilled to be Matt’s date.
Alex probably thought the same thing, for he gave the door a satisfied thump. “See you Thursday night.” As we pulled away from the curb, I said to Matt, “Don’t worry about me and your friends. I’ll be on my good behavior.”
“I was just getting used to you,” he replied, “and now you’re going to change?”
“I can’t win with you!” I exclaimed.
“Didn’t know you wanted to.”
I shook my head and sighed. “Listen, Matt, before we get to the house, we have to talk.”
“About Grandmother,” he guessed, and slowed down a little. “Did she get worse after I left?”
“Not worse, but she’s really starting to get to me, the way she blames me for the things that are moved. I needed some information so I could figure out what was going on. I went to see Mrs. Riley.”
The firm set of his mouth and long silence told me he didn’t like what I had done.
“She used to work for the Scarboroughs,” I went on, “back when Grandmother and Aunt Avril were teens. Did you know that?”
“I knew she had worked at the house.” He flicked the Jeep’s blinker with one finger, then made a sharp turn. “And I know better than to trust her.”
“She told me that the Bible, the clock, and the painting were moved back to where they used to be years ago, when Avril was alive.”
He glanced sideways at me. I couldn’t see enough of his face to know if he was surprised by the news.
“Mrs. Riley has a way of coaxing information out of people,” he said, “then feeding it back to them in a different form, so that they think she’s telling them something new.”
“But she guessed where the clock was found. And though I told her the landscape was moved to the music room, she knew it was hung over the Chinese chest.”
“Megan, think about the size of the painting. Where else would you hang it in the music room? As for the clock, a lot of people keep them in entrance halls. Every old house in Maryland has a grandfather clock in the hall or on the stairway landing.”
“It’s too much of a coincidence,” I insisted.
“Mrs. Riley makes her living off coincidences. I hope you didn’t pay her a lot.”
“She didn’t charge,” I replied somewhat smugly.
“She’s counting on you to come back. Then she’ll charge double,” he said, sounding just as smug.
We rumbled across the Wist bridge. I turned back to look at it, remembering that Sophie had seen the ghost there.
Didn’t ghosts haunt battlefields and other places where they died? If Avril had died somewhere between the mill and the doctor’s, could it have been while Thomas was driving over the bridge?
“Where’s the mill?” I asked.
“On the creek. About a third of a mile beyond Grandmother’s driveway there’s a road to the left. It runs down to the mill.”
“We’ve got some time,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“No,” he responded quickly.
“Why not?”
“There’s nothing to see,” he said. “It’s been abandoned for years and is full of mice and rats.”
“Okay, I’ll go later without you.”
He shook his head. “Pigheaded.”