I was on my feet instantly, my heart beating rather faster than normal. I hadn’t imagined it. I could definitely hear the sound of footsteps over the whistle of the wind in the trees and the crash of the waves. Then I told myself that it was broad daylight and I had nothing to alarm me. It was probably just one of Chief Prescott’s men been sent to patrol the area once more. The footsteps came ever closer, that same slow measured tread that was alarming in itself. It was the footfall of someone moving cautiously, but with purpose. I looked around me but could see no one. When the bushes parted just outside the gazebo, a few feet away from me, and a face poked through, I leaped back, stifling a scream, until I saw it was Terrence. He laughed and pushed his way through the undergrowth.
“It’s all right, it’s only me,” he said. “I heard rustling in the gazebo so I thought I’d creep up and take a look.”
“Some creeping. I heard you coming a mile off.” I replied with as much bravado as I could muster, ashamed now of my weak and female reaction to his sudden appearance.
“Then why did you look so startled when I poked my head through the foliage?” he demanded, coming up the steps to join me in the gazebo. “Who did you think I was? The Jersey Devil moved north for the winter?”
“No, but you have to admit that one doesn’t expect a face to appear suddenly through the foliage like that. Among civilized adults, that is.”
This made him laugh even more. “But then, my dear, this is the jungle and I’ve never been a civilized adult. Ask my parents. My mother has completely given up on me and spends long hours on her knees in front of statues, praying that I’ll see the light and start acting like a God-fearing and sensible human being. My father has tried everything and has now also pretty much given up on me in disgust.”
“You don’t seem so uncivilized to me,” I said. “What is it that has made them despair of you?”
“My riotous living, I suppose. Wine, women, and song. Especially the wine, of course. You’ve heard no doubt that mother is a big noise in the temperance movement. Beware the demon alcohol and all that.”
“Yes, I did hear something of the sort.” I found that I had to return his smile. There was something unmistakably likable about him, whatever his failings might be. “So what were you doing creeping through the undergrowth?”
“I couldn’t take it in the house another moment,” he said. “It was getting too much for me.”
“You have felt it too,” I said. “I sensed it right away.”
“Sensed what?” he asked.
“You said you couldn’t take it in the house another moment so I wondered if you also found it—oppressive?” I phrased it carefully, not wanting to use the word “haunted.”
“Oppressive? More like depressive. All that weeping and gloom and doom. I mean, I miss the old fellow as much as anyone, but weeping and wailing won’t bring him back, will it? And those steely-eyed policemen everywhere watching us. Enough to give one the shivers and make one confess to something one hasn’t done.”
And he gave a slightly forced gay laugh.
“But you still haven’t told me why you were creeping through the undergrowth,” I said. “If you wanted to come to the gazebo, there is a path directly from the house.”
“If you really want to know, I wanted to check that it was unoccupied before I emerged,” he said.
“Really? Why was that? You didn’t want to risk encountering one of those policemen?”
“Exactly.” He grinned then lowered his gaze like a schoolboy who is on the carpet before the headmaster. “All right. I have a confession to make. I won’t be giving it to the priest so I’ll make it to you. My reason for coming this way was not entirely honorable.”
“Really?” I tried not to sound too interested.
“I heard my father talking about a decanter and glass that Uncle Brian must have left in the gazebo last evening before he plunged to his death. Since my sister and father watch the booze in the house with hawk eyes, I thought I’d take a stroll on the off chance that the decanter might still be here. But alas I see it isn’t.”
“You’d have been taking an awful chance,” I said.
“Of being caught by Eliza?”
“No, of coming to a bad end,” I said. “Did it not occur to you that if your uncle had fallen to his death after drinking in this gazebo that maybe the drink had been tampered with?”
The smile faded. His mouth opened wide in surprise. “Good God. You’re suggesting that the old boy was poisoned?”
“I’m suggesting it is a possibility we should consider, given that you all think it unlikely he’d just have blundered over the cliff by mistake. Poisoned or drugged. What if there was something in the liquor to make him drowsy or to disorient him?”
He hit himself on the side of the head. “I never thought of that. Stupid of me. I might have been lying at the bottom of that cliff by now if you hadn’t been here.”
“Hardly, since the decanter and glass have been taken away.”
Terrence sat down and patted the bench beside him for me to join him. “So tell me, Mrs. Sullivan,” he said in an intimately low voice. “Do you really think that my uncle was murdered?”
I sat. “What do you think?”