Toad in the Hole Read online

  “Since I was kid, at least. Why?”

  “Edmond is attentive to your grandmother, don’t you think?”

  “She buys things and pays him to repair or refinish them. Edmond is one of a kind.”

  Travis coughed loud enough to break my gaze from the bar. Leaning back against the booth, he said, “Edmond seemed all too pleased to escort your grandmother back to her room.”

  “If you’re trying to gross me out, it’s working.”

  “Hey, senior citizen sex. It’s a reality.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Ha ha. Doing it doesn’t stop when you get a membership to the AARP.”

  His comment caused my arm to flinch and reflexively I drained my pint, which helped dull the throb in my dodgy shoulder. An old bunk bed injury that flared with rain began aching when we landed. “Ya, it does. And they are not doing it.”

  “Wanna bet? Twenty bucks says something’s going on.”

  My eyes lodged under my eyelids as I greedily inhaled second hand smoke. “I’m taking the bet, but the last thing I want to do is catch them…at it.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve witnessed live action.”

  “Watch it.”

  Licking beer froth from his lips, he said, “Discovering things is your specialty.” Was he flirting?

  “That’s ridiculous. I’d know if something was going on between them.” Changing the subject, I leaned in. “See those two at the bar?”

  “For the love of… we’ve only been here, what? Two hours? And you’ve found a guy?! Get your hormones in check, Rach.”

  “Seriously. The two guys standing. Have you ever seen them before?”

  “There are like forty guys at the bar and I’ve never seen any of them before.”

  I watched the two men who came in last make their way to the corner of the bar near the taps. They reminded me of squares trying to stuff themselves into circles and I was sure that the didn’t have any affiliation with the pearly party. Olive-washed skin, one in a polo under a jacket, the other in a striped oxford. Both wore jeans, normal enough. But theirs were dark denim and had creases ironed into them. Gold watchbands hung on their wrists and scuff-free supple leather slip-ons, like penny loafers without a slot for the coin, clad their sockless feet. “Look again. The two at the end.”

  Barely glancing, he said, “Not my type. Are you looking for an older model with an international appeal?”

  “They look suspicious.”

  “Oh, here we go.”

  “What?”

  “You’re manufacturing trouble.”

  “I am not.”

  “Face it Rach, you’re a master at it.”

  Pulling his pint toward my side of the table, I asked, “Are you buzzed? This English beer has a higher alcohol content.”

  In a blink, he scanned the bar then went off on a soapbox. “No one is staring at us any more than we’re staring at them. There’s a group of Rastafarians near the fireplace, some German tourists two tables down, and Lord-only-knows what rock all these exuberant pearly types beamed down from. Their outfits make that oyster brooch you wear look subtle.” He pulled his beer back. “Stop staring at them and they’ll stop staring at you.”

  “Despite what you think, my oyster brooch is tasteful, and I consider it a good luck trinket.” My eyes darted back to the bar.

  Travis switched seats, blocking my view.

  “What’s good luck about it?”

  “It protected me.”

  His hand flew up into the air in a mock stop sign. “Before you continue, I can tell I’m going to need another pint.”

  “You like warm beer?”

  “I don’t and I’m desperate enough to ask for a glass of ice cubes. “Do you want another?”

  I nodded.

  As Travis stood at the bar, I watched his mannerisms: his relaxed shoulders, the angle between his eyes and temples. While taps were being pulled, he turned his head in my direction then twitched in a mock spasm toward the two dudes.

  The two men of interest didn’t budge the fill line on their drinks. Their beers may as well have been ornaments.

  “God, they’re stingy with the ice. You’d think I’d had asked for a free sample of caviar the way the bartender looked at me. He pushed a juice glass toward me. This is what I got.”

  “Four cubes?”

  Travis took two, and spared two for my pint.

  “Alright, I’m ready.”

  “For?” I asked.

  “For the tale of the how the brooch protected you.”

  My tongue glided across my crooked eyetooth. I trusted him. And there was no way he had anything to do with what went down in the South Carolina swamp.

  Holding a palm up, he said, “Let me guess. You were wearing it when Bubba showed up to seduce you, and you defended your chastity by stabbing him with the clasp.”

  “Travis Howard, what an imagination you have. Very funny. Tee-hee. Pick on my mistakes.”

  Stacking coasters, he not so subtly chuckled. “Clay Sorenson appeared unannounced and sat on it, damaging his privates.”

  “That’s warped! And besides, that incident last year was not my fault. When you’re in a waterbed, an exploding M-80 can damage—things. As it turns out, him and I not happening was for the best.”

  “Don’t tell me, bird-boy, military-dude used the mollusk to fight off poachers.”

  Some pearly queens linked arms and began singing a round of Bow Bells of London at the top of their lungs. Ignoring them, Travis fixed his gaze on me.

  “I like him,” I said in a voice that sounded more defensive than I meant.

  “Enough to sleep with him?” he purred.

  Travis was definitely buzzed. “Maybe.”

  “More than once?”

  I shared a lot of my life with Travis, but not everything. “Things happened.”

  His face lost its playfulness. “Last I heard, he’d moved to Spring Island in South Carolina. I thought you two were over.”

  “We were until spring break.”

  Travis whistled.

  “How was he injured?”

  “He was not injured.”

  “Yet.” Travis snorted.

  “Stone knows how to handle himself.”

  “Lucky you!” He sang. “And?”

  “What?”

  “This conversation is painful. Are you going to tell me or not?”

  Under the influence of lager, I weighed the consequences of what to tell or not to tell. “We hooked up.”

  “I bet you did, you hussy.”

  I picked at a peeling nail. “We discovered something.”

  “You’re not the first.”

  Detecting sarcasm made me wonder, was he jealous? “No, not what you’re thinking. We discovered something about my oyster brooch.”

  Travis made a mock snoring sound. “Boring.”

  “It opens and has an engraving on the inside.”

  “That’s very Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy of you two to discover.” Wiggling his fingers, Travis pretended he could cast a spell. “A secret code to decipher, like in a box of Captain Crunch when you align the alphabet with numbers inside the treasure chest.”

  I tried to figure out how he had become so inebriated, before me. Unraveling my ponytail, I quickly re-fastened my Sun-In streaked hair. I’d thought adding a few highlights the day before the trip would perk up my dull brown. Boy, was I wrong and I hadn’t had time to do anything about the blonde-chunk mishap before we left. “GG said the broach had been gifted to her from an old friend.”

  Travis eyes traveled to a distant galaxy, clearly not connecting the dots. “And why do I care?”

  The two guys of interest were still at the bar, dawdling. Crinkling my nose, I chugged past the tepid foam in my glass. Tiny bubbles popped down my throat. Shrugging, I said, “It’s no big deal.”

  NOTE TO SELF

  GG and Edmond: a non-happening. Travis is gonna lose a twenty.

  Do I have to
ilet paper hanging out of my pants? Can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Bloody Tower

  Rain began to plunk from the dreary sky as low cloud cover hovered above the mortar and stone. Ravens perched on a slatted roof squawked complaints. I tightened the ties beneath my nylon jacket hood and Travis tucked a few escaped pieces of my bangs back inside.

  “Seeing it from the outside, it’s impressive. But being here, inside the Tower of London…”

  “Is completely creepy,” he said.

  A Yeoman Warder led a group of about forty tourists, Travis and me among them. I estimated our guide to be in his late sixties. A robust man, he was dressed in full regalia, complete with button coatdress and top hat, all red and navy with a string of military service medals across his left chest.

  “The Tower of London is not the Tower’s official name. It is actually: ‘Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress, the Tower of London.’” He pointed in front of us. “This is a typical example of Norman military architecture of the late eleventh century. The White Tower rises to more than twenty-seven meters above the ground. The walls are made from Kentish limestone, with finely cut Caen stone, imported at great expense from the conqueror’s Norman homeland.”

  It could have been the after-effects of too many warm beers last night, but I started to imagine the people that had stepped on the cobbles where I stood. The Tower of London was, after all, a prison for history’s rich and infamous. It was freaky to think about those who had been here awaiting trial, or worse, execution. Surely Travis and I trod along the same paths as past victims and traitors.

  Erratic droplets threatened, but the sky didn’t pour rain.

  “Kind of odd that GG and Edmond didn’t come with?” Travis mused.

  His innuendos about my grandmother and Edmond were so far-fetched I didn’t deem them worthy of a response. Pushing my hands deep into my jacket pockets, i blinked a raindrop from my lashes. “They both have been here more than once.”

  “Edmond and GG are big history buffs. I would have guessed that sharing in your first impression of the Tower would have been right up their alley.”

  Travis’s vivid imagination was quickly becoming annoying. “GG said she was viewing a partially-completed commission. Edmond was going to accompany her to the storage facility.”

  “A painting?” Travis asked.

  We followed our assigned Yeoman across a courtyard. “Situated on the Thames, the Tower was never supposed to be a prison. Originally it was a royal palace and fortress. You are all standing on the grounds of an official royal residence of Her Majesty the Queen. She has a house onsite which she could still inhabit if she wished.”

  “She said it was by an artist she knew back in the sixties. He passed away last year.”

  “What artist?”

  “She didn’t say. They met when she lived in New York. He painted a tin of Heinz Baked Beans. The English kind, but didn’t finish the piece. She’s not sure what to do with it.”

  “Only twenty-two executions have ever taken place at the Tower of London and most were performed on the nearby Tower Hill. The last man to be beheaded here was the Jacobite octogenarian, Lord Lovat in 1747.”

  All the gore and killing in one place over such a long period of time—a thousand years—I considered to be bad juju. It couldn’t be mentally healthy to work in this kind of environment, and I wondered if the Yeoman Warders who lived within the tower walls slept well at night.

  “Who buys a painting of half a can of baked beans?”

  I listened to the tourists talk among themselves. It was like a meeting at the United Nations: Chinese, German, Arabic, and Russian languages chattered around me.

  “Apparently my grandmother, although I’m not sure if she bought it.”

  Travis nudged my shoulder. “Did she win it in a poker game?”

  “I don’t know much about her personal business. Just that she likes to collect and she seems to have the means to do so.”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Ask her what? How did you get all your money? That’s breaking a golden rule.”

  “What golden rule?”

  “You never ask people who have money how they got it.”

  “She’s your grandmother, not some stranger.”

  “A grandmother I only recently met. Maybe at some point she’ll tell me, but I’d hate for her to have the impression I’m more interested in her finances than in her.”

  Noisy squawking ensued from a beak that was shaped like a bowie knife. Our tour guide motioned toward a silky black raven whose neck was covered in shaggy feathers. “Legend says that the kingdom and the Tower will fall if the six resident ravens ever leave the fortress, so seven ravens are kept, one extra, just in case, to protect the Crown and the Tower.”

  Motioning to an adjacent building, the Yeoman ended our tour and said, “The jewels of the monarchy have been on display since the late seventeenth-century and can be viewed.”

  The sky opened its spigot and a soaking rain fell. Going inside to peek at the jewels seemed a good escape.

  “Do you think we’ll get a chance to scope out some cemeteries, maybe pop in a funeral home or two while we’re here?”

  “Why?”

  “A lot of famous people are buried in this country. I’d like to pay my respects.” He ducked inside a passageway where we stood single-file in a line of tourists. “I’m curious. You like to admire paintings, I like to analyze gravestones—the stories they tell. Lives memorialized in just a few words.”

  What was it with me being attracted to the quirky types?

  “Death is what we all have in common. Sooner or later it will happen to all of us.”

  I shuffled along a velvet-roped area behind Travis. After centuries the air inside the stone buildings still carried the heaviness of untimely, violent death and I shuddered. “Hopefully later.”

  “You don’t know. None of us know. It’s unexpected. That’s the cool thing about living—the journey, and where you end up after it all. If, at a young age, someone told you where you’d die, there’s no way you’d believe them.”

  “You’re depressing me. Knock it off.”

  An attendant who emerged from the corner instructed us to keep moving. Under glass cases I could see a row of crowns, necklaces, and scepters. Guards stood in each room. A friendlier female attendant gave her spiel. “In 1649, after the English Civil War, the crown jewels were destroyed on the orders of Parliament. Crowns, scepters, and bracelets, some dating back to the time of Edward the Confessor in the eleventh-century, were broken and defaced. The gold and silver was sent to the Royal Mint to be made into coins.”

  “There was no telling if all of the pieces were melted,” I whispered

  The sheer volume of gems set in gold that passed before my eyes, blew me away. Travis pitched a whistle. “What do you think this all is worth?”

  “Billions.”

  Travis pointed to a twelfth-century gold anointing spoon. “Look at that. The card says it’s the oldest piece in the collection that survived the civil war decree.”

  My head whirled. Someone actually owned this collection. Walking backwards on the moving belt, I attempted to read the plackets that brushed by too quickly, and had to get into line two more times. There were two famous, whopper diamonds in the display. One of the stones, the Cullinan, rested on top of a three-foot golden scepter, and the other diamond was set into a crown. I couldn’t help but notice an enormous amethyst and weighty emerald in the scepter. It made the puny stones that weighted the brooch on my chest seem sorry.

  Travis crooked his neck toward me and whispered, “How does one country acquire all of this?”

  “This is the British Empire. Read between the lines. Gems like these were looted after they sacked a country or were presented—meaning taken as payment—for not overtaking some regime.”

  “That’s a bit stark.”

  “When’s the last time
the British mined an emerald or sapphire?”

  Travis shrugged.

  “They don’t. Gems and pearls aren’t from here.”

  “Rachael, don’t get your undies in a bundle. All kinds of things journey around the earth until they are lost or destroyed.” He eyed my chest and I protectively put a hand over my heart. “Picking up shiny things and pocketing them is human nature. Stems back to hunting and gathering. And collecting is in your blood. It’s what your grandmother does and you’re just getting started.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The eye of Horus from the New Orleans voodoo queen you wear as a necklace, and the stinking oyster that’s pinned on your shirt. You have your treasures.”

  I was glad I hadn’t told him about the pink crystal in my pocket. The one Sakar—a feng shui devotee neighbor of Dad’s girlfriend had given me to help in relationships. “These aren’t stolen or plundered, they were gifts given to me by strong-spirited women.”

  Leaning into my ear, Travis whispered, “Is that what you call voodoo-practicing, out-of-body seeking, potion-tinkering enthusiasts? Back in the day, those women would have been called witches.”

  “I don’t believe in the magical powers of trinkets as much as I do the spirits of the women that insisted I keep them.”

  “If that’s your story.”

  It irked me when Travis had a point that involved me. “You up for visiting a museum or gallery?”

  “Of course.”

  Outside of the Tower a few tourists hovered beneath the eaves of rooftops. My red Candie’s flats sloshed across a grassy lawn and the leather bow drooped. Parked cars lined the street, and we looked for the one GG had hired: a black sedan with a sign posted in the darkened window that read ‘O’Brien.’ I didn’t admit it to Travis, but he was right. I was disappointed to be touring London without my grandmother. I thought she’d brought me here so we could spend time together, but it seemed she had another agenda. Something to do with taking an inventory of paintings she kept in a warehouse near the inn where we were staying. And Edmond was here to assist her with anything that needed to be refurbished or touched up. At least I had Travis to pal around with.