Read Online Walking the Labyrinth by Lisa Goldstein - Free Book Online

wondering if you had a copy.” He glanced through the pages.
    “It’s quite fragile, really,” Charles said, smiling his diffident smile. He held out a hand and after a moment John gave him the pamphlet. His hesitation was not embarrassment, Molly realized, but a way of keeping others at a distance, almost a form of rudeness. Charles returned the pamphlet to the shelves. Although he seemed proud of Lady Westingate’s peculiar house it was clear that he did not want to discuss her later folly, the Order of the Labyrinth.
    “Is there anything else you’d like to see?” Charles asked. “We’ve mostly bedrooms upstairs, and servants’ rooms in the attic. They’re not terribly interesting, I’m afraid. Princess Helena and her husband, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, stayed in the blue room once. She was a daughter of Queen Victoria.”
    “The labyrinth, if we could,” Molly said.
    “Yes, of course. Kathy, would you show them the basement?”
    “Sure,” Kathy said. “This way.”
    Kathy led them out of the library and down a long hallway. She stopped before a door remarkable only for its plainness: unlike the other doors they had seen it was not carved or gilded or painted in any way. She opened it, turned on a light, and started down a flight of stairs.
    The room at the bottom was filled with the clutter of generations: boots and broken mechanical toys, hunting rifles, chairs with three legs, a stuffed deer’s head. Paintings leaned against the walls.
    Molly looked closer at the paintings. They seemed to be stilted nature scenes. “Don’t worry about hurting my feelings,” Kathy said. “I know they’re dire. We didn’t paint them, thank God.”
    “Who did?” Molly asked.
    “The last family that owned the house,” Kathy said. “Dreadful people. Industrialists playing at being gentry.”
    “I thought the Westingates owned the house,” Molly said.
    “We lost it for a while,” Kathy said. “Fortunately Charles was able to buy it back.”
    How? Molly thought. She was just about to ask when she felt John step on her foot. She looked at him, annoyed. How were they going to learn anything if they didn’t ask questions?
    Upstairs a bell rang, and was answered. More bells chimed in. “Tibetan music,” Kathy said. “My husband loves it. And the acoustics in the Great Hall are fantastic. The labyrinth is this way.”
    They picked their way through the jumble on the floor and stopped before another door, this one open. A hallway lay beyond it; several feet down another hallway branched off at right angles to the first one. Kathy switched on the light. The walls were blue, lit by frosted white lamps placed at intervals along the corridor.
    “Do you know how to get out?” Molly asked.
    “I did once,” Kathy said. “When we moved back Charles and I went exploring. I don’t know if I’d remember, though.”
    They heard a tinny double ring upstairs, clashing with the Tibetan bells. “Damn, there goes the phone,” Kathy said. “Charles won’t answer that. Excuse me a minute.” She hurried back through the room and up the stairs.
    “Why don’t you let me ask questions?” Molly said when she had gone.
    “How long have you been a detective?” John said.
    “I’ve got to start somewhere.”
    “Okay. You can start by letting me teach you something. Very few people want to talk about their money. If they do they’ll bring it up themselves. Charles mentioned the family fortune a few times—he’s the one I’d ask about finances. He wants to pretend all this means nothing to him, but you notice he keeps dropping names. Kathy wants to think she’s British aristocracy.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Look at her clothing. Nothing fancy, even a little worn. Reverse snobbery. And did you notice how sarcastic she was about the family who had lived here before? She has even less right to play at being gentry—at least they were British. My guess is that Charles married her for the money and she