High Rhymes and Misdemeanors, Page 2

Grace woke to the whisper of rain against window panes.

  She spent several moments blinking up at the ceiling beams. Six hours and four Gypsy Queens later, she was lucky to be waking at all. Carefully she sat up, and was amazed to find the room stayed stationary. Her head throbbed, but moderately; nothing that a cup of tea and a bottle of aspirin couldn’t fix.

  A cautious turn toward her traveling alarm clock warned Grace that it was eight-thirty. She was to meet Peter for breakfast at nine. She tossed back the white comforter and climbed down from the four-poster bed, padding over to the dressing table.

  “How’s Esmeralda, Queen of the Gypsies, this morning?” she asked her reflection.

  The reflected Esmeralda looked Grace up and down critically. Medium height, womanly contours; Grace had the gift of so many American women: great skin and straight, white teeth. Her eyes were green and long-lashed, but Grace considered her strong points to be her legs, which were long and shapely, and her hair, which was very long, auburn and naturally curly. Grace’s hair was the envy of her tenth graders; her legs, the envy of her twelfth. Even old Esmeralda could not fault these.

  Frowning, she tried to remember how the night before had ended. Toward the bottom of the fourth Gypsy Queen, things had gone a little fuzzy. One thing stood out in her mind: Peter had not been trying to seduce her. He had been charming and attentive; he had bought her drinks and paid her compliments, but nothing in his manner had suggested he wanted to know her more intimately.

  In fact, as ridiculous as it seemed in the gray light of morning, it appeared to Grace that Peter, if anything, had been trying to…well, pump her for information.

  Good luck to him if that was the case, Grace reflected. Unless Peter was a rival scholar planning to refute her thesis, he would have found last night’s conversation of little practical use. The more Grace drank, the more enthusiastically she had babbled about her dead poets, about literature and about the glories of the English countryside. Not that Peter hadn’t egged her on. He had asked all the right questions and listened attentively to her answers. He had laughed in all the right places, and made Grace laugh too much) as well. By the time they had said good night, Peter Fox knew all there was to know about Grace Hollister. Grace knew nothing about Peter Fox.

  Grabbing her sponge, bath gel and towel, she stepped out into the hallway. She still found it strange sharing a bath with other guests. It brought back memories of college dorm life, though she had discovered English plumbing to be more eccentric than the American.

  The plumbing at the Tinker’s Dam was no exception. Although the inn boasted a shower, a blast of scalding water drained away to a trickle. Muttering under her breath, Grace fiddled with the knobs and was rewarded with a burst of ice-cold rain.

  After the first shriek, she endured the cold wash, rinsing shampoo out of her hair as quickly as possible, teeth clenched.

  A brisk towel-down helped to restore circulation, and the cold water had taken care of her headache. Grace wriggled into coffee-colored jeans and an oversize cream sweater. Fastening her hair into a loose braid, she opened the door into the drafty hall.

  At the far end of the hallway a room stood open. Grace could see that the bed was stripped. A maid was running a dust mop along the floorboards. The room was Peter Fox’s.

  Slowly, Grace walked down the corridor.

  “Excuse me.” And as the maid looked up inquiringly, “Has Mr. Fox checked out?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “But…when?”

  The maid looked surprised. “This morning, I suppose.”

  “Do you know if he left any kind of message?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “We were supposed to have breakfast together.”

  The maid looked doubtful. “You could ask downstairs at the desk, miss.”

  But the word at the desk was no more reassuring.

  “Left during the night,” Mrs. Tompkins, the comfortable wife of the innkeeper, informed Grace. “Bit funny really. Just packed up and left.”

  “But his bill—”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” the woman said easily. “He paid cash for the room.”

  “In advance?”

  Mrs. Tompkins shrugged. “Some folks do.”

  Wild improbabilities flitted through Grace’s mind: panicked flight, abduction, murder. Foul play, in short. But he paid for the room in advance, which probably meant he had planned to leave early anyway. She tried to remember whether they had made firm plans for breakfast or left it open. The shank of the evening was a little fuzzy. Still it was odd…

  “Did Mr. Fox leave an address?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that, miss.”

  In her best schoolmarm manner Grace said, “I completely understand, but Mr. Fox fell and hit his head last night. I just want to make sure that he’s all right. It doesn’t sound as if he is. You know, wandering off in the middle of the night. He might have a concussion or something.”

  “I’m sure it was nothing like that, miss.” But Mrs. Tompkins’ eyes slid uneasily toward the register book.

  Grace tried to look as sincere and responsible as she knew how. The kind of woman parents entrusted with their impressionable daughters.

  “We were supposed to have breakfast together,” she offered.

  Mrs. Tompkins wavered. “As to that, you wouldn’t be the first lass stood up by a man,” she pronounced. “Alls the same, I can’t see what harm it would do. You two seemed cozy enough last evening.” She dragged over the register book, heavy with years of guests, and ran a work-worn finger down the page.

  “Here we are. Mr. P. Fox, Craddock House, Innisdale Wood, Cumbria. Sounds familiar, that.”

  “Sounds like a relation of Peter Rabbit,” muttered Grace, jotting down the address.

  Stolidly, on cue, Mrs. Tompkins returned, “I wouldn’t know about that, miss.”

  While Grace ate her breakfast of Irish oatmeal and boiled egg in a china cup, she studied Peter Fox’s address. Having got hold of this information, she asked herself, what am I going to do with it?

  As Mrs. Tompkins had tactfully pointed out, it wasn’t the first time in the history of man that one of them had skipped out on a date. If she could only be sure that they actually had made a plan to meet. Had the thing been left more casually than Grace remembered? There had been no need for Peter to suggest breakfast, let alone sneak off in the dead of night to avoid sharing it with Grace.

  Last night had, thanks to the Gypsy Queens no doubt, a dreamlike remoteness, but Grace knew that she had not dreamed resuscitating Peter Fox. Someone—Mutt and Jeff?—had tried to kill him.

  And sometime during the night Peter had disappeared.

  Were the two things related?

  Peter Fox might have disappeared for his own reasons. What those reasons might be, Grace couldn’t imagine, but then she really knew nothing about Peter Fox. She didn’t even know if he was married, although he didn’t wear a ring.

  She did know that he had not seemed at all worried or afraid yesterday evening. She deduced that since he had not wanted the police involved last night he would not appreciate her going to them now with vague suspicions and rash conjecture. Grace suspected that even if Peter had been kidnapped, he probably wouldn’t want the police involved.

  So that left two possibilities. Grace could either forget about Mr. P. Fox of Innisdale Wood and continue her vacation, or she could try to reach him at home in South Cumbria.