“Most likely.”

“So I’ll be all alone in a haunted house.”

“What makes you think it’s haunted?”

“If you were a ghost, Bern, would you pass up a place like this? The walls tilt, the floorboards creak, the windowpanes rattle every time the wind blows. You might as well hang out a sign-‘Ghost wanted-ideal working conditions.’”

“Well, I didn’t see any sign like that.”

“Of course not. The position’s been filled. I’ll be lying here awake and you’ll be downstairs looking for The Big Sleep. Bern, look at Raffles, he’s pacing back and forth like an expectant father. Open the bathroom door for him, will you?”

I opened the door and looked straight at a batch of coat hangers.

“ Bern, don’t tell me.”

“It’s an old-fashioned authentic country house,” I said.

“Does that mean they don’t have bathrooms?”

“Of course they have bathrooms.”

“Where?”

“In the hall.”

“Gee,” she said, “I sure am glad we’re not in some impersonal modern resort, with numbered rooms and separate beds and level floors and rattle-free windows and private baths. I’m glad we don’t have to put up with that kind of soul-deadening experience.”

I opened the hall door and followed Raffles through it. I came back to report that the bathroom was just down the hall, between Uncle Edmund and Aunt Petra. “And Raffles doesn’t seem to mind that it’s a communal john,” I added. “He found it perfectly suitable.”

“How’s he going to get in there by himself, Bern? If the door’s closed, he won’t be able to turn the knob.”

“If the door’s closed,” I said, “that means somebody else is in there, and he’ll have to wait his turn. If the john’s not occupied, you leave the door ajar. That’s how it works with communal bathrooms.”

“What about this door?”

“Huh?”

“How’s he going to get out in the middle of the night,” she said, “if our door’s closed?”

“Hell,” I said. “We should have brought a cat box.”

“He’s trained to use the toilet, just like a person. You can’t go and untrain him.”

“You’re right. I guess we’ll just have to leave the door open a crack.”

“That’s great,” she said. “You’ll be downstairs, and ghosts’ll be dragging chains through the halls, and I’ll be lying in here in the dark with the door open, waiting for the young ’un to murder me in my bed. This gets better every minute.”

“‘The young ’un.’ Orris? Why would he murder you in your bed?”

“Because that’s where I’ll be,” she said, “unless I’m hiding under it.”

“But what makes you think he-”

“‘Better to have him plowing driveways than locked away his whole life.’ What do you figure he did that made them lock him away?”

“But that’s the point, Carolyn. They didn’t lock him away.”

“It evidently crossed their minds,” she said, “and they decided against it. What do you figure gave them the notion?”

“He’s evidently a little slow,” I said. “Maybe there was some sentiment in favor of institutionalizing him for that reason, but instead it was determined that he could lead a productive life outside.”

“Plowing driveways, for instance.”

“And being a general handyman.”

“And lurking,” she said. “And drooling. And slipping into Aunt Augusta’s Room with an ax.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “when people are cranky, it’s because they’re hungry.”

“And sometimes it’s because they need a drink, and sometimes it’s both.” She got out of bed, combed her hair with her fingertips, brushed some imaginary lint off her blazer. “C’mon,” she said. “What are we waiting for?”

After all that, I was expecting dinner to be a disaster-translucent roast beef, say, and vegetables boiled into submission. The outlook improved, though, when we got to the bottom of the stairs and met a woman with feathery blond hair, plump chipmunk cheeks, and an air of radiant well-being. “The Rhodenbarrs,” she said, beaming, and who could presume to correct her? “I’m Cissy Eglantine, and I do hope you’re happy in Aunt Augusta’s Room. I think it’s quite the coziest, myself.”

We assured her it was charming.

“Oh, I’m so glad you like it,” she said. “Now we’re getting a late supper laid for you in the dining room, but I wonder if you might want to stop in the bar first? Nigel’s especially proud of his selection of single-malt Scotches, if you have any interest at all in that sort of thing.”

We admitted to a sort of academic interest and hurried off to the bar. “The trouble with trying to compare different whiskies,” Carolyn said when we finally moved on to the dining room, “is that by the time you’re sipping the fourth one, it’s impossible to remember what the first one tasted like. So you have to go back and start over.”

“And before long,” I said, “you have trouble remembering other things. Like your name.”

“Well, nobody else remembers my name, so why should I? I just got here an hour ago and already I’ve been Ms. Runcible and Mrs. Rhodenbarr. I can’t wait to see what the future holds. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “Something smells terrific.”

And so it was. A rich and savory soup, a salad of romaine and Boston lettuce with walnuts and dill, and a thick slab of prime rib flanked with crisp little roasted potatoes. The waitress, a skittish country girl who might have been Orris’s sister (or his wife, or both), brought us mugs of brown ale without asking, and filled them up when we emptied them.

Dessert was some sort of fruit cobbler, topped with what Carolyn said had to be clotted cream. “Look at this,” she said. “You could float a scone on it. You could float the Stone of Scone on it. Bern, forget everything I said.”

“Starting when?”

“Starting when we got here. You want to know something? I don’t give a rat’s ass if the place is haunted. If the ghost’s got any sense he won’t come anywhere near our room, anyway. He’ll hang out in the kitchen. Bern, this is one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life.”

“You know what they say. Hunger’s the best sauce.”

“I was hungry enough to eat my shoes,” she said, “I’ll admit it, but it was still an incredible meal. Can you believe it? The coffee’s good. I meant to order tea, because everybody knows the English can’t make a decent cup of coffee. But this is great. How do you explain that, Bern?”

“Maybe they didn’t come straight here from England,” I suggested. “Maybe they stopped off in Seattle.”

“That must be it,” she said, and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “Look at me, Bern. A couple of pops and a decent meal and I think I died and went to heaven. I’ll tell you something. I like it here. I’m glad we came.”

CHAPTER Six

After dinner we drifted from room to room, getting our bearings on the first floor of Cuttleford House. There was, God knows, an awful lot of it, and one room just sort of led to another. We started out in a sort of sitting room called the East Parlour, and I might have taken it for the library if I hadn’t already seen the Great Library in the brochure. The parlor had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. The other walls sported memorabilia-crossed spears, West African ceremonial masks, and the stuffed head of one of those crossword-puzzle animals. An oryx, say.

There were more books on a breakfront, braced by a pair of bronze Abraham-Lincoln-seated-and-looking-pensive bookends, and there were revolving bookcases flanking the floral-patterned sofa.

“There are books all over the place,” Carolyn murmured. “You saw the bookcase in our room, didn’t you?”

“Uh-huh. It reminded me of my bargain table.”

“No Big Sleep, huh?”

“Just a large yawn. Mostly late-model paperbacks. Last year’s best-sellers. The kind of book you take along to a resort and leave behind when you go home.”

“If you managed to finish it.”