Stillwater

by Maynard Sims

  “It’s not an interrogation,” she said defensively. “I’m just curious, that’s all.”

  “And nothing’s happened to pique your curiosity?”

  “What makes you say that?” she said. It was obvious he thought there was more to it.

  He sat back in his chair, picked up his panini, bit into it and didn’t answer her. “Eat yours,” he said. “It’ll get cold.”

  “I’m starting to think you’re being deliberately evasive,” she said.

  “And you’re being deliberately vague.” He looked at her for a long moment, and then let out a prolonged sigh. “You’re right,” he said. “There are things about Stillwater that we chose not to tell you. Now I’m doubting the wisdom of that decision.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Edward Falmer—you would have seen him when you passed the office earlier. He’s old school; doesn’t believe in full disclosure when it comes to property. His attitude flouts government regulations, but sometimes that’s not such a bad thing…and I don’t say that from an agent’s point of view. I think sometimes a prospective buyer or someone like you, a long-term tenant, can be unfairly biased against a property by something that will never affect them.”

  “Like a tragic history,” Beth said.

  James shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “I see,” Beth said.

  “Well, would you have been put off Stillwater if you’d known its history beforehand?”

  “Well, as Mirri set the whole thing up for me, and I didn’t actually have anything to do with it, I can’t say, but I think Miranda might have had second thoughts. She was horrified we visited the lake where Jessica drowned, so it’s possible she might have pulled out of the deal. She’s quite superstitious.”

  “Then I can only apologize. We made a judgment call and maybe it was a bad one. Listen, Beth, if you want me to find somewhere else for you I’ll get on it right away.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve started the novel now. In my own way I’m as superstitious as Mirri. I started it at Stillwater, I intend finish it there. If I stop the flow now I might never get it back.”

  “Well, is there anything I can do to make amends?”

  She was silent for a moment. She bit into her panini, chewed, swallowed and took a sip of her latte. “Yes, there is,” she said. “You can start by being honest with me. I want to know the full story of the Franklins. No bullshit, no omissions. I want to know everything you know.”

  He drained his cup, and glanced at his watch. “Okay,” he said. “I owe you that. But…”

  “But?”

  “It will have to wait for another time. I have to get back to the office.” He rose to leave.

  “Tonight. What are you doing tonight?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Then come round. Half seven. I’ll cook.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure that I want you to come round, or sure I can cook?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “I cook a mean chili, and if I didn’t want the pleasure of your company I wouldn’t have invited you. Well, that and finding out more about the house.”

  “Half seven,” he said. “And now I must dash. I’ve got another appointment, and I’m already five minutes late.”

  She watched him leave, finished her food, paid the bill and made her way back to her car.

  As she wheeled herself past Falmer’s, she glanced through the window and saw James sitting at a desk deep in conversation with an elderly man dressed in tweeds. He looked to be in the middle of a sales pitch. Beth hurried on by. She was smiling and humming a tune to herself. For some reason she was feeling extraordinarily happy.

  Chapter Sixteen

  She stocked up at the supermarket on the way home, getting the food for the evening as well as supplies to last her the rest of the week. Once home she faced the laborious task of unpacking the shopping and loading her fridge and freezer. After a number of trips back and forth to the car she finally shut the back door and opened a bottle of wine. She poured herself a large glass of Merlot, and took it onto the veranda to sit and enjoy the last sunshine of the afternoon.

  She had only taken one sip of her wine when her cell phone rang. Caller ID told her it was James and her heart sank. He was going to cancel, she was sure of it.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Red or white?”

  “Eh?”

  “I’m buying wine for tonight and I wasn’t sure which you preferred.”

  She let out her breath in a long sigh of relief and took a sip of her Merlot. “I’m just sitting here with a glass of red, and I don’t want to switch horses in midstream.”

  “Mixed metaphor if ever I heard one. Red it is then,” he said. “See you at seven thirty.”

  “Yeah, see you then.”

  She disconnected, and relaxed into her chair, taking a large gulp of wine and closing her eyes. She felt giddy and wasn’t sure if it was the drink or the relief she felt that he wasn’t going to let her down. “Get a grip,” she scolded herself. “You’re making more of this than it actually is. It’s just a meal, nothing more.” She was speaking aloud. If Teddy were still around she’d be talking to him, confiding her secrets, her innermost thoughts. The cat made a great listener. Passive, nonjudgmental, everything a girl could ask for in a confidante, and she was reminded sharply how much she missed him. She sniffed back a tear, swallowed the last of the wine, and went in to prepare dinner.

  Well, he’s punctual if nothing else, she thought as she opened the door to him. He was casually dressed, and his hair wasn’t as neat as it had been earlier. He bent forward, pecked her on the cheek, and at the same time handed her a bottle of Pinot Noir. “Something smells delicious,” he said, and walked across to the kitchen counter. “Corkscrew?”

  “Three drawers across, two down.”

  As he pulled open the drawer, she wheeled herself to the cooker and lifted a spoon from the steaming chili pot, and breathed in the aroma. Satisfied, she dropped the spoon back into the pot and spun round to face him. He’d uncorked the wine, and was pouring some into the second of the two glasses she’d set out on the counter.

  “I thought red wine had to breathe,” she said.

  “It can breathe in the glass,” he said, and handed her a half-full wineglass. Nodding her thanks, she turned and headed back to the sofa.

  “Come and sit down,” she said. “Dinner will be another a few minutes yet. The rice is nearly ready.”

  He sat down on the sofa and took a mouthful of wine. “Not bad,” he said appreciatively as he swallowed.

  “Well, have you decided?” she said, as she wheeled up opposite him.

  “Decided what?”

  “Whether or not you’re going to tell me everything you know about the Franklins?”

  “I decided that this afternoon,” he said. “But first, you must tell me, have you seen or heard anything out of place?”

  “Ha! Well, that’s one way of putting it.” Briefly she told him about the incident in the bathroom, the overheard argument coming from upstairs, the feeling that she was not alone in the house. “The scratches on the bedroom door you’ve seen for yourself, and Derek told you about Teddy.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Won’t that do?”

  “Well, it’s a start. The people before you had a three-page list of things they thought were wrong with Stillwater. Mind you they had been here two months before they contacted us to complain, and they weren’t the easiest of people. She was very highly strung and he should have been. He was something in banking, and had an elevated opinion of himself. They were on a three-month lease, but left with twenty days still to run on it.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  He gave an easy smile. “I don’t think so. Many of their compl
aints were about practical matters, and all the issues they raised were addressed during the refurb. Besides, I don’t think you’re the type of person to be easily alarmed. After the events that have happened to you, you’re still here.”

  “That’s because I’m nosey. The Franklins intrigue me. I want to know all about them.”

  “Okay. Let’s start with dinner. I’m ravenous.”

  “Okay, but I’m not letting you off.”

  “I’ll tell you everything once we’ve eaten, but the smells coming from the kitchen are distracting. I concentrate better on a full stomach.”

  She held her hands up in defeat. “Okay, okay. You win. Food first. I’ll go and dish up.”

  “Need any help?”

  She shook her head. “I can manage. You can choose the music. You know where the stereo is.”

  As she ladled the chili and rice onto the plates, she stole a glance across at him as he rummaged through her music collection. “Is there anything you like? Celine?”

  He glanced back at her with a smile. “Quite a lot actually. You have good taste—apart from Celine Dion!”

  He chose a disc, slipped it in the CD player and pressed a button. Seconds later the intense vocal stylings of Jeff Buckley filled the room.

  “Good choice,” she said, as she carried the plates to the table. “And appropriate. He drowned in tragic circumstances too.”

  “So he did. I’d forgotten.”

  “How close were you and Jessica?” she said, as she watched him take the first mouthful of chili. She was nervous. She hadn’t cooked for anyone other than herself in a couple of years, and she found herself willing him to enjoy the food.

  He took another mouthful, swallowed and dabbed at his lips with a napkin. “This is really good,” he said. “Probably the best chili I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Probably?” She looked at him archly. A smile played on her lips.

  “No, it’s very good. Seriously good.”

  “So, you and Jessica…” The smile deepened.

  “We were very good friends.”

  “You gave the impression there was more to it than that.”

  “Did I? My mistake. Jess and I were close, but there was never any romantic involvement. We would talk a lot and she confided in me. Her life at home was…difficult.”

  “Was it worse once her mother had gone?”

  “No, actually it seemed to get easier for her. Jess said Dolores was not an easy person. They were always arguing, in some conflict or other. Her father didn’t help matters. Privately he’d side with Jess, but if there were any conflicts where the three of them were involved he’d unite with his wife. I suppose that was understandable. I think he always took the path of least resistance. Anything for a quiet life.”

  “So Jessica was isolated at home and at school.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Poor kid. It must have been awful.” She thought about her own recent isolation. Since being confined to the wheelchair she felt cut off from much of the kind of life she had enjoyed before.

  He nodded and took a mouthful of wine.

  “Tell me more about Dolores. Arthur Latham said that she saw herself as a bit of a hippie, even a witch. Any truth in that, or was it just malicious gossip?”

  “According to Jess, Dolores saw herself as a lot of things: hippie, mystic, cougar… Jess found it embarrassing.”

  “Cougar?”

  James nodded. “Sadly. For an older woman she was very attractive, and I think she liked to exploit her sexuality. She had most of the boys at school drooling over her. I think she enjoyed the power it gave her.”

  Beth opened her mouth to speak but he cut her off. “And before you ask, no, I wasn’t one of them. I was friends with Jessica. I knew how much her mother’s behavior bothered her.”

  “And did she ever act on the attention she was receiving?”

  He shook his head. “No. Jess told me that although her mother was flattered by the attention, schoolboys were too young, even for her. Besides she didn’t need them. There was a group of young men in town who apparently satisfied all her needs. According to Jess, Dolores played up the mystic part of her personality. They were her acolytes and she took full advantage of her position.

  “But I don’t think she had an honest bone in her body. Even her name was a fake. She was Christened Margaret Mary O’Donnell to a family of gypsies based in the southwest of England. Devon, I think. She adopted the name Dolores because she thought it made her sound more exotic. How she wooed and won Bernard Franklin was a mystery to everyone who knew him. Franklin is a well-educated, very successful businessman whose family owns large parts of west Suffolk. Jess said that her paternal grandparents never accepted Dolores into the family and, although they treated their granddaughter well, and were never overtly hostile to their son’s wife, there was certainly no love lost there.”

  “She sounds like a screw-up,” Beth said.

  “Yes, she was, and in turn she made her daughter into one.”

  Beth reached across the table and topped up their wineglasses. “Did she come back for her daughter’s funeral?”

  “If she did nobody saw her. In fact no one’s seen her since the day she left. I know for a fact that, up until her death, Jessica never heard from her.”

  “Perhaps Dolores died as well,” Beth said.

  “Maybe. But if she did then word of her death never reached this part of Suffolk. And Bernard Franklin has never made mention of it.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Last October. He came into the office for a meeting with Edward Falmer about this place, just to green-light the changes your agent wanted made. We spoke, but it didn’t really amount to a conversation, just pleasantries. I’m not even sure he recognized me as the scruffy sixteen-year-old who used to come to his house all those years ago as his daughter’s friend.”

  “So where’s he living now?”

  “When he’s in this country he spends time at his house in Cambridge. He has a massive place, a Victorian pile, close to Cherry Hinton. He lives there with a housekeeper and a gardener-cum-handyman and, as far as I know, that’s it. He’s never remarried. When he’s not there he has property abroad: Switzerland, Portugal and St. Lucia in the Caribbean. He’s a very successful businessman, and very rich.”

  “It makes you wonder why he maintains an interest in this house then. I mean, Suffolk hardly compares to St. Lucia, does it? And if he’s as rich as you say I wouldn’t have thought the rent I pay means an awful lot to him.”

  “It baffles Edward Falmer too. He’d been trying to get Franklin to sell up for years, but now he’s given up. He says Franklin has a very deep attachment to the place.” James stood suddenly. “I need the bathroom,” he said. “Excuse me.”

  “I’ll fix dessert,” she said, and wheeled herself across to the cooker.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “I’d like to meet him,” Beth said.

  “Who? Franklin? Why?”

  “I told you, I’m nosey. I’d like to hear his version of the story.”

  “Stick to writing your own stories,” James said. “Bernard Franklin won’t agree to meet a tenant. At least he never has in the past. That’s why he employs Falmer’s: to save himself the bother.”

  They had moved to the sofas for their coffee. It was only the second time Beth had sat on the deep, leather chesterfield, and it had taken a few minutes to transfer herself from her wheelchair. James stood back and watched while she completed the maneuver, not offering to help. He was learning.

  “Are you Italian?” he asked, switching the subject. “Alvarini’s not exactly an Anglo-Saxon name is it?”

  “I married an Italian, and kept his name after I divorced him,” she said. “Before that I was plain old Elizabeth Brown.”

  “Did it last long, the marria
ge?”

  “Too long. We married too quickly—hardly knew each other. It was a whirlwind romance that developed into a full-blown hurricane, and about as destructive. A big mistake.”

  “We all make them,” he said.

  They lapsed into silence as they drank their coffee.

  “And what about you?” she said, as the pause grew pregnant. “Have you never been tempted to find a Mrs. Bartlett?”

  “I’m not the marrying kind,” he said. “Besides, no one’s ever come along to persuade me to make that commitment.”

  She was watching him closely. A shadow had passed across his face, and he shifted in his seat, as if the topic of conversation was making him physically uncomfortable.

  Suddenly he sprang to his feet. “I’ll put some more music on,” he said, and went across to the stereo. He picked up a CD. “Any objection to some Coldplay?”

  “None at all,” she said.

  He removed Jeff Buckley from the tray, slipped in Parachutes and pressed PLAY. When he came to sit back down he moved from his sofa to hers, sitting just six inches away from her.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “Ask away.”

  “May I kiss you?”

  She looked into his eyes. They were deep brown, soft and kind. “Yes,” she said. “I think I might like that.”

  He leaned in close, and brought his lips close to hers. “I’d understand if you said no.” Then he gave an impatient sigh, put his hand on the back of her head and pulled her close.

  The kiss was long and intimate, sweet and tender, their tongues entwined, their bodies breathing each other in.

  As the intensity increased, Beth fought down a growing urge to pull away. It had been years since she’d been kissed like this, and she was trying to let herself flow with it, to let herself enjoy the taste of him and the way his fingertips danced on her back.

  But it was too soon, too sudden, a hectoring voice at the back of her mind nagged. Did he realize that the pulses of excitement she was feeling extended down only as far as her waist? Beyond that? What? Nothing—no feeling at all.

  His hand slipped under her shirt, lifting her underwired bra, cupping her breast, his thumb flicking over her nipple.