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She had to wait while another bout of muffled French fisticuffs was exchanged.
‘Do we have to go through this all over again?’ Kate came back in an emphatically lowered voice. ‘You know why—because there’s some compromising stuff in there that I don’t want to entrust to a—to a stranger. Very, very personal information that I really, really don’t want anyone to see.’
Anya had never heard her cousin sounding so near to desperate.
‘If I asked Tyler to send me the trunk he’s not just going to take my word for it that it’s mine, after all this time. He’s going to want to go through everything with a fine-tooth comb to make sure that he’s not sending me anything that he can legally assert ownership to as part of the goods and chattels of the house. He’ll assume I’m trying to rip him off. You should have seen the way he went over the contract the real estate agent drew up. Believe me, he’s the paranoid, suspicious type…’
Didn’t Anya know it! Unfortunately she also knew exactly how desperate one could feel at the thought of Scott Tyler possessing compromising information about you in his hands.
‘What makes you think everything is still where you left it?’ she asked weakly.
‘Because if he’d already come across it I would have
heard about it, believe me,’ came the grim reply. ‘He would have taken great delight in letting me know…’
That struck a sour note and Anya frowned. ‘Kate?’
‘Anya, stop arguing about it and have a go, will you? For me? If I hadn’t let slip to that wretched journalist that I didn’t have any photos of myself as a kid because I’d left Mum’s old collection of family photos and my school certificates and workbooks at The Pines, I might let sleeping dogs lie. But I just know he’s going to go there and ask Tyler about it, then the fat will really be in the fire!’
‘Why don’t you ask him not to, then?’
‘Because he’s a journalist, stupid—that would be like a red rag to a bull. He could make a mint on some of the things in my old diaries. I have met a lot of famous people, you know, through your parents and when I was at Juilliard, and on tours…’
Anya had hair-raising visions of what Kate might have got up to with said famous people. She knew her cousin had been sexually active from a young age and saw nothing wrong with indulging her strong sensual appetites.
‘I can’t promise anything,’ Anya said stubbornly, pursuing a rising suspicion of her own. ‘And I’m not going to try until you tell me the real reason why you won’t approach Mr Tyler yourself.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Kate’s stentorian breathing crackled into the phone. ‘OK, OK. If you must know, he told me he didn’t like classical music and I called him an ignorant, uncultured barbarian…amongst a lot of other things. You know what I’m like when I’m in a temper. Fortunately, this was after we had both signed on the dotted line and I had his cash in the bank. Oh, and maybe after I’d gone he might have discovered that there were a few icky little drainage problems that I never got round to mentioning…’
‘Oh, Kate!’ She had ever been one to ignore life’s ‘icky’ problems in favour of her own comfort.
‘Caveat emptor, sweetie. I was dead keen on a quick sale and he knew he was buying an old house. So you see, the man would leap at the chance to do me a bad turn on his doorstep. That’s why I know he hasn’t found anything—yet. He’d love to see me strung up in the press. He’d consider it rough justice, the perfect revenge for my tromping all over his precious ego…’
That explained a lot. Almost everything, in fact. Now Anya knew what had triggered his inexplicable prejudice at their first meeting. It had been the thought of Kate herself, not Anya’s feeble attempt to scrape an acquaintance, which had been the cause of his jaundiced reaction. She wished that she had pinned her elusive cousin down sooner; it might have saved Anya a lot of soul-searching.
‘Look, I have to go,’ Kate agitated, the broadcast chatter in the background almost drowning out her voice. ‘This, this—cochon!—is insisting I repack my case and my flight’s almost due to go. E-mail me and let me know how you get on. And do it soon, there’s a sweetie…’
‘But—’
Anya found herself protesting to empty air. Fretting over the call, she didn’t linger in the shower, blow-drying her fine hair until the pale strands fanned like polished silk over her shoulders before drinking more of the wine than the tuna salad could soak up. After putting George out to prowl his nocturnal haunts, she sludged in front of a television reality show busting people in the process of committing shameful acts instead of stimulating her intellect with Bach and books, and ended up going to bed in a mood of belligerent depression.
It rained overnight, but by mid-morning the sky was clear again and the sun beamed down on the refreshed countryside. Kate had planned a leisurely lie-in to make up for all the early starts at camp, but her eyes snapped open not long after dawn and she found it impossible to wallow in her inactivity for long. She bounced out of bed, brimming with restless energy, and had done all her catch-up housework by breakfast. After her cup of tea and boiled egg she had intended to work off enough of her tension in the garden to enable her to settle down to the essay she was writing for her postgraduate history paper.
Instead she found herself striding across rain-dewed fields in the direction of The Pines, fuming over the flat battery which had trapped her car in the garage. The local mechanic was out fixing a tractor and wouldn’t be able to fetch her a new one until some time that afternoon. Anya couldn’t wait that long.
At least the fifteen-minute short-cut across the fenced paddocks would get her to her destination more quickly than trudging along the uneven verge of the winding road. And she didn’t want to risk meeting Mark if he was driving out to meet her.
Thank goodness Liz Crawford had rung with a sympathetic warning. Mark Ransom’s secretary was the first real friend that Anya had made at the college, and as the headmaster’s assistant she had been well-placed to offer helpful tips on how the various school systems worked, and who to seek out for advice and who to avoid amongst the other staff. The two women often lunched together at the shopping mall across the road from the school and Liz had been the first to know, and cheerfully approve, when Anya and Mark had started tentatively dating.
‘Anya? I thought I should warn you—Mark apparently received a phone call at home last night…’ Liz had paused with rather ominous nervousness ‘…from Scott Tyler.’
‘Oh, no!’ Anya closed her stricken eyes. She couldn’t believe he had done this to her. And now she had to wonder whether he had an ulterior motive for his vindictiveness. Was he punishing her for something she couldn’t help—being Kate’s cousin? Why did she feel such a terrible sense of betrayal?
‘Do you know what it’s all about?’ Liz asked delicately.
‘I can guess,’ groaned Anya.
‘Mark didn’t go into details, but it’s something to do with you and Sean Monroe at a party at Scott’s on Saturday night—’
