“I don’t know anything about them,” Kit admitted. “My father remarried less than a year after my mother’s death, and he never talked about her. I grew up knowing my stepmother’s family, and my father’s, but not my mother’s.”
I glanced toward the shelves. “Have you found any other references to Leo Sutherland?”
“No,” said Kit. “Just the one police report. But Ruth and Louise said he was unreliable. Perhaps it was their polite way of saying that he had a drinking problem.”
“I’d expect to find more than one police report if he had a drinking problem,” I said, “and I didn’t see any liquor bottles in Leo’s motor home.”
“Even so . . .” said Kit, tilting his head to one side.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “The rest of it does seem to stretch the boundaries of mere coincidence. We have to talk with Leo.” I picked up the bound volume I’d been scanning. “Call Desmond. Tell him we’re leaving. We’ll call Emma on the way back and find out if anyone’s seen Leo.”
I returned the bound volumes to their proper places on the shelves and thanked Desmond sincerely when he showed up to escort us out of the building. Kit telephoned Emma on the way to the pickup truck, but she had no joy to report. Leo hadn’t yet returned to Gypsy Hollow.
Since Leo was still on our missing-persons list, Kit dropped me off at the cottage, where I ate warmed-over macaroni and cheese and listened distractedly to the twins’ chatter. They were in the midst of describing the rat Clive Pickle had brought to school for show-andtell when the telephone rang. I jumped up from the kitchen table to answer it.
186 Nancy Atherton
“Lori?” Kit said, sounding rather breathless. “Smoke’s rising from Gypsy Hollow.”
“Don’t you dare go there without me!” I cried, and slammed down the phone.
I pulled on my hiking boots and a warm sweater, grabbed my rain jacket from the coatrack in the hall, called to Annelise that I didn’t know when I’d be back, and dashed out to the Mini.
I couldn’t explain why my hand shook as I turned the key in the ignition or why I gunned the tiny engine all the way to Anscombe Manor. I was going purely on instinct, and my instincts were telling me that the man in Gypsy Hollow held the keys to more mysteries than the ones swirling like river mist around Aldercot Hall.
Nineteen
I forced myself to putter at a snail’s pace down Anscombe Manor’s drive, to avoid the cardinal sin of frightening the horses, but as soon as I pulled in beside Friedrich’s Porsche, I leapt from the Mini and ran to the courtyard so fast that I sprayed gravel in my wake. Kit was waiting for me there, standing half hidden in his shadowy doorway, with his hands buried deep in his jacket pockets.
I would have appreciated five seconds to catch my breath, but Kit took off before I’d stopped gasping, and I raced after him, splashing willy-nilly through assorted puddles in my attempt to keep up with his long strides. When we moved beyond the courtyard’s floodlight and onto the muddy track, the darkness compelled us to slow down, until Kit pulled a flashlight from his pocket, switched it on, and sped up again.
“Good . . . thinking,” I panted, scampering around potholes caught in the fl ashlight’s bobbing beam.
Kit glanced down at me, as if he were noticing me for the first time. “Sorry, Lori. Am I going too fast for you?”
“Nope,” I managed, clutching the stitch in my side. “I’m as eager to talk to Leo as you are.”
“I don’t think you can be.” Kit moderated his pace, out of kindness to me, but his voice quavered with suppressed excitement as he explained. “When I invented the story about doing genealogical research at the Despatch, I never expected it to come true. What if Leo is my uncle or my cousin? He might be able to tell me things about my mother, things my father never told me, things I’ve always wanted to know.” He shook his head. “No, Lori, I don’t think you can be nearly as eager as I am to speak with him.”
188 Nancy Atherton
“Hurry, then,” I urged him. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll catch up.”
Kit was too saintly to leave me floundering in the dark, however, so he adjusted his stride to mine, and we entered Gypsy Hollow side by side. The motor home was still there, and although the night sky was strewn with stars, the patched awning had been reerected on its telescoping poles. Leo sat beneath the awning on the rickety camp chair, with his tin cup in one hand and a long stick in the other, gazing into the campfi re that blazed within the ring of stones.