Winter of Discontent

by Jeanne M. Dams

  Then there was my worst fear of all, mental decay. If I should begin to see the signs of Alzheimer’s in myself, or worse, in Alan, then what horrors faced us? Living in a place where people were kind and looked after all our needs? And treated us like sweet children?

  There were other sorts of places, of course. Places where the staff were not kind, where they neglected the inmates, treated them like naughty children. I had visited such places in the States, nursing homes reeking of stale urine. The residents lined the halls, slumped in their wheelchairs, tied in with bandages. Some dozed. Some cried out constantly, asking for help or calling for loved ones. The staff would tell me their cries were meaningless, that the “poor old souls” didn’t know what they were saying, that a response was useless. I had wondered even then if that was the truth or just a convenient fiction.

  But those were nursing homes and the residents all had dementia to some degree. Surely a retirement home was a different sort of environment. I wrenched my thoughts back from the scary future to the worrisome present.

  “Bill still drives, though,” I argued. “He has his independence. He has a job. Doesn’t that make a difference to people’s attitude?” I had to fight it, fight the possibility that Jane was right.

  “He’s old. We’re both old. One foot in the grave. Out of the loop. And single. Makes it worse.”

  I usually have a lot to say, but there seemed to be something wrong with my throat. I swallowed several times.

  Jane gave me an unreadable look, got up, and put the kettle on. She copes better with other people’s distress than with her own.

  A fresh pot of tea helped. So did the brewing interval, time enough to get my emotions under some kind of control and my thoughts in some semblance of order.

  “Jane, you were right. I didn’t understand completely, but I’m beginning to. You’re afraid of the whole situation, not just Bill being missing. And you think that your age, and his, will keep people from paying enough attention. Are people really that callous, though?”

  “Not callous. Ignorant. Think they know who Bill is, what he is, when they haven’t a clue.”

  “All right, then. We can’t make them older and wiser all of a sudden, and we can’t make them know Bill better. Maybe we can’t even get them to listen to us. So we’ll just have to use our own resources. And don’t look at me that way. We do have resources. You know Bill well, and you know this town as well as you know your dogs. As for me, I don’t have either of those advantages, and besides I’m something of an old crock. I may have fewer birthdays behind me than you do, but my knees would argue the point. But even if my joints don’t work very well, my mind is just fine, thank you. I can contribute ideas, lots of them. And my tongue works double time. I can ask questions.”

  Jane didn’t look impressed. I played my ace.

  “And if you don’t think much of that list of assets, I’ve saved the best for last. Alan.”

  She sat, stony-faced, and said nothing.

  “Jane, he knows the police, he’s brilliant, he’s no spring chicken, and he’s on our side. What more do you want?”

  “I want my friend, Bill.”

  And a tear coursed slowly down her weathered cheek.

  FOUR

  I WAITED, PRETENDING NOT TO NOTICE. I’D NEVER SEEN JANE CRY. She would hate to be patted on the shoulders and told, “There, there.” I debated about leaving. Would she be embarrassed? Tough, resilient Jane, reduced to tears?

  But it was, after all, only the single tear. She turned away from me, blew her nose, and stood up. “All right.”

  Jane not only speaks in shorthand, she thinks in it. “Um-m-m?” I said brilliantly.

  “Ready to go.”

  “Whoa! You’ve turned a page. Go where?”

  “Museum,” she said impatiently. “Last place we know he was. Place to start.”

  I was so happy to see her jolted out of her despair, I didn’t state the obvious: that we had been all over the Town Hall yesterday and found nothing. “We’d better drive, then. It’s pouring cats and dogs.”

  “No place to park. Have Alan drive us.”

  So Alan obligingly got out the car and drove us the short distance. “Right,” he said as he let us out of the car. “Do you have the mobile?”

  I nodded. I always keep the cell phone in my purse, even though I seldom use it.

  “Ring me when you’re ready to come home, or if you need help. I’ll be here. If the line’s busy I’m working on the problem myself. We have to find Bill soon. This is filthy weather.”

  What he didn’t say was that every passing hour made it less likely that Bill would be found alive. He didn’t have to say it. Jane and I both knew.

  “What are we going to do, now we’re here?” I asked.

  “Ideas are your department, remember?”

  Well, I had said something like that, hadn’t I? I pulled myself together and tried to look intelligent.

  “All right, then, we talk to the assistant. What is the kid’s name, anyhow? I keep forgetting.”

  “Tubbs. Walter Tubbs.”

  “Oh. I knew it was something like Potts. Poor boy. I can imagine what the boys must have called him at school.”

  “Good job he’s not fat.”

  Jane was herself again, determined to keep a good Britishly stiff upper lip. Good for her. I hoped I could live up to her example.

  The assistant was at Bill’s desk when we opened the door to the museum proper. It had apparently not been a busy day so far. His string of paper clips reminded me of the chain that encircled Marley’s Ghost.

  He jumped up when he saw us. “Miss Langland! Any news?”

  “No.” Jane was brusque. “Thought we might pick up some ideas here.”

  The boy’s shoulders slumped. “I thought so, too, but I haven’t found a thing. I hoped he might have left me a note, but if he did, I haven’t seen it.”

  Bless the child, he was worried. Now I had to come up with a way for him to help. He worked with Bill two or three days a week. Surely he’d be able to tell us something.

  “Mr. Tubbs, my name is Dorothy Martin—”

  “I know. Mr. Fanshawe told me about you when you were in once. He said you always wear hats.” He held out his hand. “And please call me Walter. I somehow haven’t quite got used to ‘Mr. Tubbs’ yet.”

  “Delighted to meet you, Walter. Now, we’re here to see if there’s any hint at all about where Bill might have gone. No, I know you’ve looked, but there’s an approach we haven’t tried yet. At least, maybe the police have, but if so I don’t know about it. I’d like to figure out, if I can, what Bill might have been doing yesterday morning before he disappeared.”

  “Ah, the old ‘retrace his steps’ ploy,” Walter said in a creditable Inspector Clouseau accent, with a momentary grin. “But I can’t help much. All I know is that he’s been working a lot on the old acquisitions, things people gave the museum donkey’s years ago. Most of it is pure rubbish, you know. Love letters, family albums, war medals, things of no possible interest except to the family. But Mr. Fanshawe has to sort through all of it to make sure there’s nothing valuable, and then write letters to the donors explaining why we can’t keep their family treasures. It makes a lot of work.”

  “Hmm. There could be something in that, I suppose. Do you have to type the letters for him?”

  “Sometimes. Usually it’s only a form letter, and he can do that himself easily enough on the computer. I do the touchy ones, when it has to be rather lengthy and especially tactful. I’m rather good at that sort of thing, funnily enough, and I’m a decent typist.”

  He reminded me of a Labrador retriever, not wildly competent but eager to please. I smiled at him. “I expect you are. Have you had to do any of those special letters lately?”

  I suppose I had some vague idea about a family that had become irate at Bill’s rejection of their donations. Incensed by what they perceived as an insult to their family honor, they had …

  “No,”
said Walter. “Nothing. I’ve just been doing the usual dogsbody routine: filing, showing visitors where to find things. Dead boring.” He held up his chain of paper clips with a grimace. “I should be doing other things, really. There’s a special exhibition coming up in a few months, and lots of work connected with that. But Mr. Fanshawe never lets me do anything very important, and he’d be annoyed if I made mistakes. I don’t know quite what to do, actually.”

  I felt sorry for him. Maybe he seemed incompetent because he’d never been given a chance to show what he could do. I pulled off my yellow plastic hat and ran a hand through my hair. “Well, I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. I don’t know the first thing about running a museum. All I can do is try to find Bill as soon as possible.” I was rapidly running out of ideas, but I could follow up on my earlier notion about Bill’s background. “What about—um—has any of Bill’s work lately been about World War II memorabilia?”

  Walter looked at me pityingly, and even Jane snorted, worried as she was. “Nearly all of it,” said Walter. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? War ended sixty years ago, more or less. So most of the old soldiers are dying, or they died a few years back and their families threw out their things. Unfortunately, a lot of it comes here instead of going in the rubbish bin. Although it’s usually only a stop on the way.”

  I sighed. Well, I never thought this was going to be easy. I ran my fingers through my hair again. “All right. I suppose the next thing is to go upstairs and look around. Bill does have an office up there? I mean, it isn’t simply a storeroom? I didn’t really notice yesterday.”

  “Well, there’s a desk and a chair and a lamp. Most of the rest is filing cabinets and boxes. I don’t know what you might be looking for, though.”

  “I don’t either. There has to be something. There has to be a reason. People don’t just disappear into thin air.”

  They did, though. Not often, but every police department in the world has a thin file of cases about people who just disappeared, a year ago, ten years ago, a hundred. They walked out the door and were never seen again, dead or alive. We had to go on the assumption that Bill wasn’t one of those cases, that there was a sensible reason for what had happened, and if we could work it out, we’d know where to find him.

  We hoped.

  So we trooped up the stairs, Walter leading the way with Jane trudging sturdily behind. I made a poor third, holding tightly to the banister and wincing every time a knee cracked or threatened to give way. I was really going to have to see if something couldn’t be done about those knees, once more important things were out of the way.

  The second floor of the Town Hall, when it was the center of Sherebury city affairs, had been a single large room for mayoral receptions, smallish public meetings, and various other functions. When the museum had taken over, a wall had been built to divide the room in half. Shelves and filing cabinets had been installed in one of the halves. A museum always needs a good deal of live storage space. The other half had been left as it was, since there would still be occasion for receptions. We walked through the elegant half and into Bill’s work space.

  As I had expected, the room was a mess, but it was what I thought of as a purposeful mess. As every housewife knows, there is a stage of tidying up when things look much worse than they did to start with. Order is being produced, but the casual eye perceives it as a disaster. I thought I could see here evidence of sorting and even, occasionally, of controlled excitement. One could almost hear Bill saying of one find or another, “Here! Look at this!” even as he dismissed most of the junk as just that.

  I stole a glance at Jane. If Bill’s personality came through here to me, who knew him only slightly, how much more powerfully it must be evoked for her. If she was in distress, however, she hid it well, setting her mouth into a firmly blank expression.

  “He won’t let me put anything away,” Walter said apologetically. “He says he knows where everything is. The cleaners aren’t even allowed in.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to help us look. At least you know something about the work he was doing. You might be able to spot something missing, or something that shouldn’t be here.”

  “Well … I can try. But I’ll have to go downstairs if anyone comes in.”

  “No one’s likely to take a sudden notion to go to a museum on a day like this. Would you choose to be here if you didn’t have to be?”

  Walter grinned and began somewhat aimlessly to turn over piles of papers. “Tell me again what I’m looking for?”

  “I don’t have the foggiest idea. Something that doesn’t fit the pattern. I get the feeling Bill is pretty methodical. There are piles, after all, even if they do look a bit haphazard.”

  “Oh, he has his methods. He’s been sorting things by family, and by date, and by historical significance. That’s to say, everything related to the Whosis family would be in one pile, and everything related to the Queen’s accession in another—”

  “And if they overlap? If Mr. Whosis, or Lord Whosis or whatever, happened to be in on the Coronation in a big way?”

  “That’s where it gets tricky, of course. I think then he photocopies documents and puts one in both piles, as a cross-reference.”

  “It all sounds exhausting, but it gives us enough idea of Bill’s system to make a start. Walter, if you’ll bring a couple of chairs upstairs and find someplace to put them, we’ll begin looking for anything that doesn’t seem to belong.”

  Of course, in my house, I thought as I settled down with a formidable stack of papers, things are constantly getting put where they don’t belong. It means nothing except that I was thinking about something else at the time. I joke about it, claim I have no memory and can lose something in fifteen seconds flat.

  Thinking about Bill and the problems of aging, I decided I wouldn’t make that particular joke again. It wasn’t really so very funny.

  The papers I was going through weren’t easy to read. Many of them were handwritten, and I’ve always found English handwriting somewhat difficult. The stack I’d chosen apparently had to do with the Lynley family, squires and benefactors of Sherebury for hundreds of years. The main family had died out long ago, but some of their distant relations still lived hereabouts, and apparently some of them had been taken with a fit of attic-cleaning. The documents they had seen fit to donate to the museum looked to me to be of no value whatever, but if Bill had planned to throw out the whole mess, it would have occasioned one of the super-tactful letters Walter specialized in.

  Certainly there was nothing in the stack that shed any light whatever on Bill’s disappearance. Sighing, I put the Lynleys back where I’d found them and started on the next pile.

  We worked most of the day. Walter braved the rain at lunchtime and went out for sandwiches and coffee. We ate them almost silently and got back to work as soon as we’d finished

  I was beginning to doubt we’d get anywhere. It all felt so futile. Here we sat poring over long-dead papers and artifacts, while a living, breathing man was lost somewhere. I called Alan in the middle of the afternoon, even though I knew he would have called me if there had been any news. “Nothing yet, love. At least we know a lot of cold, wet places where he isn’t.”

  Small comfort.

  By four o’clock there was so little light from the windows that it was hard to work. The electric lights in the room weren’t at all bright. The museum probably did that deliberately, to keep old objects from fading, but it certainly made the place gloomy. My neck and shoulders were aching and my morale had sunk to rock bottom. We were making no progress at all, except that the room looked a little neater than when we’d begun.

  “Jane, let’s call it a day. We were both wrong. This isn’t a reasonable place to search. We could spend a week in here and never even know if we’d found anything that mattered.”

  Jane grunted and pushed herself back from the desk, where she’d been exploring the drawers. “Wonder what this is doing here?” she said, pointing to something i
n the top drawer.

  “What? Have you found something?” My voice was sharp with excitement, my fatigue forgotten.

  “Nothing that matters. Just wondered why Bill has an atlas of the States in his desk.”

  I pulled the book out. It was one of the big road atlases, the kind that Rand McNally puts out, with two pages devoted to each state, sometimes more for the really huge ones like Texas and California. It looked new.

  “Here, let me see that,” said Walter.

  “Was he planning a trip to America, then?” I asked Jane.

  “No. He was planning—we were planning—” Her voice cracked and she stopped, then took a deep breath and began again. “Wasn’t going to tell anyone. We’re planning to be married.”

  FIVE

  “BUT—BUT I THOUGHT—”

  “Thought we’d quarreled. We did. Made it up. His idea to get married. Said Heatherwood House wasn’t his sort of place. Wanted to get out of it, wouldn’t live in my house unless we made it legal.”

  I tried to knit together the fraying threads of my composure. “Well, that’s—that’s wonderful.” It sounded flat. I tried again. “He’s a lovely man, Jane. I hope you’ll be very happy.” If we find him. I didn’t say it aloud, but of course I didn’t need to.

  “That’s why I know he hasn’t taken French leave. We were to be married today.”

  “Oh, Jane!” My voice broke. I looked at Jane, but her face was stony. Did she want sympathy? Probably not. She was holding on to her composure by a thin thread.

  “But why didn’t you tell anybody?” I asked, trying not to sniffle. “Alan and I would have wanted to be there, and lots of other people would, too.”

  “See a pair of old fools tie the knot? Pah! Better entertainment on the telly.”

  “Well, you’ve let the cat out of the bag now. Where were you being married? In the Cathedral?”

  “Registry office. Didn’t want a fuss.”

  “Oh. Then there were no arrangements to be canceled. Unless—did you plan to go away?”