by Iona Whishaw
Reginald lifted his hand in a sort of salute and followed Glenn out the door. “Well, I’m off. Alice will be expecting her mail.” They heard him greet the two people still talking outside. Lane leaned back to look out the doorway and saw him walking quickly up the road.
“He seemed to be in a hurry,” she commented.
“It’ll be Alice,” said Eleanor. And because she was meticulous in not gossiping in her post office window, she turned back inside and began to tidy up.
Angela winked at Lane, who looked puzzled, and jerked her head to the outside. “Bye, Eleanor!” she called, and steered Lane out through the screen door. “Do you have a cup of—God, I nearly said tea! You English! Can you manage a cup of coffee at your haunted house?”
Sensing a scoop, Lane said she could also manage a biscuit. “By which you undoubtedly mean a cookie,” Angela sighed. They could see Glenn on his brown mare trotting up the road past Reginald as they crossed the garden toward the little bridge leading to Lane’s house.
Farther up the road, past the turnoff that took people away from King’s Cove and on to the Nelson road, Reginald was looking more closely at the letter he’d been handed. England, but it was no one he knew. For reasons he couldn’t have completely expressed, he knew he would keep it a secret from Alice.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE COFFEE MADE, THE TWO women settled on the canvas chairs Lane had put onto the porch. Though it was before eleven in the morning, the sun already had a noon intensity, so they slid their chairs and her little French cast-iron table under the wide overhang of the roof. Lane felt a smug delight that she’d had the foresight to pack this little memory of France into her boxes coming to the new world. There was a moment of silence while they both drank and Lane could not decide if she wanted to close her eyes to hear the warm, heavy silence of the day, or keep them open to drink in the rolling greens that reminded her so much of her childhood home. She had wanted to spend this first summer slowly absorbing the terroir, as Yvonne would have said, in this new world. That now seemed a distant dream since Tweed Jacket had been found in her bit of creek. She sighed. Even without him, and the appalling implications for her that she tried to keep at bay, she supposed, she would still be here with Angela, and Angela would still be inclined to talk her morning away. The difference now is that she really needed to hear what Angela and anyone else might have to say about the people she’d come to live among. She hadn’t done this thing; therefore, that body was connected to someone here. If Darling couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put in the effort, she could.
“Gosh, you were lucky, sweetie! This view! I ought to be painting it. I love our cabin, don’t get me wrong, but we haven’t got this outlook.” Angela gazed hungrily out across the lawn to the lake in the distance. The morning shadows had lifted off the mountains on the other side, adding a blue-green intensity to the horizon that opened suddenly into an almost inky blue sky. She was right, Lane thought, seeing it as Angela must be seeing it. She was lucky. She’d never thought of herself as lucky, as having anything anyone else would want, but here it was. This house. Old Lady Armstrong and all.
“Hardly a cabin, Angela. You’ve made a veritable mansion of the place. And no one else in King’s Cove has a real grand piano and someone to play it.”
“You’re darn tootin’!” Angela conceded and settled back. “I bet you are wondering about Mather, and his lovely wife ‘Mad.’ No, you’re probably much too proper to be nosy about the rest of the world. But that family! Their little bit of land borders ours, luckily a mile away from the house. For starters, Reginald is an awful snob. I’m sure he’s the one who’s led the charge on calling us the ‘Yanks.’ I can’t be bothered explaining that Yankee in the States only refers to northerners and cannot safely be applied to all Americans. When we first arrived he wouldn’t acknowledge us at all and when he finally did he seemed intent on persuading us that we wouldn’t be able to stomach life in the wild, as he called it. Ha! He should try living in New York. He doesn’t know the meaning of wild!
“I heard from old Mrs. Hughes, you know, that Reginald had predicted we wouldn’t survive our first winter. He still treats us as if we are beneath his contempt. Kenny told me when I was complaining about it that Reg was probably still angry because he had wanted to buy our land, and he lost to Dave. Only, of course, Dave had no idea he wanted it, so we hardly did it on purpose.”
Lane didn’t want to stop the flow of Angela’s talk. “So what is the story on Reginald’s wife? She seems like a military drill sergeant. Was she a WAAF during the war? No, she’s much too old. Did they have them during the first war?”
“That I couldn’t tell you, but she spent the last war here. Her son, the tiresome Sandy, went to agricultural school and then signed up and did something outrageous, because he got sent back from training camp very suddenly. It doesn’t stop him from swaggering about as if he had single-handedly saved a battalion under heavy fire. No, the thing with her is, I don’t think she’s very well, if you get my meaning.” Here Angela tapped her head. “I don’t know the whole story, but I can tell you I was at the post office a couple of years ago one morning in November and Alice came pounding in with her stick and began to berate Eleanor out of the blue. I think someone else was there, old Max from the cabin near the lake, maybe. Gosh, I wonder what’s happened to him. I haven’t seen him in absolute ages! I wonder if he’s died, and is moldering away in his cabin? How would anyone even know? Horrors! It doesn’t bear thinking about!”
It was a place, Lane realized, where someone could die in a cabin and not be found for years; however, she would, just at that moment, have liked Angela to be the kind of woman who could stick to a narrative without dashing off on every tangent that presented itself. “Why was Mrs. Mather berating poor Eleanor? I should have thought she was the last candidate qualified for such treatment.”
“Well, that’s the thing. No one could ever be mad at Eleanor, which is how you knew Ma Mather was not all there. She was yelling at her that she’d been hiding her mail, and steaming it open. Spying on her, that sort of thing. After that Reginald started coming more often. Other times she’d come down and she’d be fine. Well, fine for her. Still that brisk barky tone of hers, but she wasn’t accusing anyone of anything. It must be very hard for him. I mean, one of the things she said is, ‘He’s put you up to this, hasn’t he?’ God knows how she carries on at home. And no one is safe if she’s roaming round the settlement looking for cougars. She’d shoot anything that moves.”
No wonder people had seemed slightly tentative when Mrs. Mather had come in to the post office that day. No one knew what sort of mood she’d be in. So, she seemed potentially mad enough to whack someone over the head and shove them in a creek. Was she strong enough? And why would she do it? Surely even she would have to have a reason. Lane realized she knew nothing about paranoid conditions.
“You know, Lane, I can’t tell you how glad I am you’ve come.” Angela’s serious tone brought Lane’s gaze and mind back to the present. Angela had reached out and now took her hand. “It’s not that we don’t love it here; we do. It’s beautiful, and the orchard and garden and the three boys keep us ridiculously busy. And Dave, of course, composes when he can find time. He has a few connections in the movie industry in Hollywood. And there’s the high school in Nelson. Who has time for anything else, really? But I didn’t realize till you came how much one could miss having a friend. Having someone who is my age, and who lives a little in the modern world. It’s heaven!”
To Lane’s alarm, Angela had teared up. “Oh God, I’m sorry,” she said. She took her hand back and fumbled in her pockets for a handkerchief. “I didn’t realize how it must have been getting to me. Dave is off to Nelson every day during the school year and meets regular people there every day. I was beginning to get panicked about when the boys have to go off to school. Rolfie is going this year to Balfour. I know it’s only three miles away and I can entertain myself driving him every day. But it’s the begi
nning of the end, isn’t it? Then it’ll just be me and the apple trees.” She sniffled and looked moodily at the table.
Lane smiled. “Hardly the beginning of the end, my dear! I’m told children need their mothers well past their eighth year.”
Angela giggled at this. She looked at Lane. “Why did you never marry?”
Why indeed? thought Lane. “Well, never is extreme. You are going in for extremes today. I’m only twenty-six. I was working at nineteen. The war came. I didn’t have time, really.”
“But didn’t you have a sweetheart? You must have! You’re utterly gorgeous. My friends in New York tell me lots of the fellows came back with English wives. But here you are all by yourself.”
This line of questioning opened up so many paths Lane would have preferred to forget. She tried to form an answer that would satisfy Angela’s curiosity and, for that matter, the demands of a real friendship. She too was happy to discover that her new community contained within its strange expatriate, somewhat aging bounds, the vibrancy of an Angela. In London, or France even, she supposed she would have found it difficult to maintain the kinds of friendships she had with the other single girls she worked with as they all married and buried themselves in children and husbands. Here, though, was a woman her own age, with three children, and there was between them almost the energy of teenagers.
“I did have someone,” she said at last. “But he died near the end of the war. I suppose you could say I came here to get as far away as possible from all of that.”
The smudged photo of the tiny bit of writing came to her mind and she felt a momentary sense of keeping some internal avalanche at bay. She told herself briskly that though the incriminating piece of paper found on Tweed Jacket might be evidence of someone trying to get her back to London, it was certainly not written by Angus—he was dead.
“Oh, gee, of course you did. And here am I pestering you! And, let’s be frank, you’re not the only one here getting away from things. I sometimes think Dave . . . I . . . well, I should stop yakking on, is what. I’m not from New York originally, you know. I’m from Ohio and I tell you my female relatives set a fine standard of summertime porch gabbing. I better get back. I left Dave with the boys. I’m not sure who I’ll still find alive!” Angela pushed herself out of the deck chair and picked up her mail. “It’s going to be another lovely, warm night. How about we all go down to the wharf for a picnic supper? The boys are crazy for beachside fires.”
They agreed to this plan and Lane watched Angela walk up her treed driveway, past the barn, and through the gate to the road. What had she meant, not the only one getting away from things? Secrets. Everyone had secrets, even a man from his wife. And connected to some secret, somewhere, was the dead man she had seen.
It had been a relief not to know the dead man. It beggared belief that someone here must have known him enough to want to kill him and yet he might have been seeking her. There are coincidences in this world, she assumed, but this was a coincidence that went beyond the pale. The someone who knew him might have followed him here, perhaps. That would make slightly more sense. But if this was the work of her ex-agency it would have been done more neatly. There wouldn’t be bodies stuffed in creeks or shoes suddenly appearing. Someone here had to have known him.
With a sigh she turned back into the house. It was cool still, because she’d left all the doors open. She should sit down and write. She’d started a story based on one of her friends in London who’d been in love with a man who died in Burma and she’d been left with their baby. She felt inadequate, suddenly, to tell that story. She’d never had children, and saw now that at this late stage, she was unlikely ever to have any. Write about what you know, she’d been told by a journalist friend. But her life was such a series of changes and jerks from one world to another, brought up by a hodgepodge of multilingual aunts, governesses, grandparents. There was nothing, not one shred of her life, that was normal, that could translate into something anyone else could begin to understand or relate to.
She felt torn between a desire to avoid writing by reading under the shade of her weeping willow and, conversely, exhausting herself with a long walk along the upper paths of her property. This would take her back to the road and temptingly near the path to the creek. That was it, of course. It wasn’t any impulse to avoid writing. Writing was going to be a way to avoid the mess she was in right now. She needed to take that walk. To look again at the scene. To think through what she knew, because after Angela this morning, she was pretty sure she knew more than just that Mather was a snob and had a mad wife and she would need to walk to let her mind assemble the pieces. This much she had learned during the war.
LANE WALKED PAST her great grey barn without giving it a glance. Among the many joys of having something that was truly hers was knowing that she would one day go in there and really have a look. There was still so much to do in the house. When she had first moved in, she’d imagined herself busily painting all the rooms and sewing and changing curtains, and spending hours in furniture stores in Nelson to pick the right furniture. Instead she had found she was the sort of person who liked to be in a place without altering it so she could get a sense of what it ought to be. She had painted one room, the bathroom, because it had been newly plumbed, but they hadn’t changed the pale green paint. Now it was a sparkling ivory, a clean white with just a touch of warmth to reflect the warmth of the sun during the day and the electric light at night.
The road, as usual at this time of day, was deserted. As she walked along the road, hearing nothing but the gentle crunching of her own steps, she was thoughtful. Since this whole thing began, she had tried to see it as something that did not concern her. She was new, and though it took place in her part of the creek, it was also Harris’s part of the creek, and the Bertollis’ part of the creek. Because she had had nothing to do with the murder, she had assumed everyone would see that. The return of Darling with his questions and his photograph of the paper in the victim’s pocket had seriously shaken her, and yet she was aware that she had been like someone holding her breath till it all went away. She had been pushing every consideration that the murder could in any way involve her to the back of her mind.
This thing had started—no, ended—in the wooden water diversion and so she must start there. Now, for the first time since the war had ended, she found herself engaged in the kind of mental sorting that had kept her missions clear to her: a place for everything and everything in its place. And so, as she walked, she lined up what she knew. She might not solve anything like this, but by making sure that nothing she knew was left out, the facts might line themselves up and suggest new ideas. It was like poetry—you just wrote the lines and walked away. When you came back, they seemed to form a new entity.
The grassy bank of the creek was dappled with sun and shade, and the water flowed and broke with a subtle music that was soothing in the early afternoon. Lane sat down and leaned back on her elbows with her legs outstretched. The water, now that the impediment to its flow was gone, had shrunk back to its normal banks and was less like a pond and more like a creek. She waggled her feet in a momentary burst of happiness. It was utterly beautiful here. She should be here with a picnic and a good book. She’d found a copy of Maugham’s The Painted Veil in one of the boxes she had not completely emptied on to her bookshelves yet. Luckily she’d not read it. Why had she packed a lot of books she had already read? It was unlikely, except for the poetry, that she was going to read them again. Except the Wodehouse, of course. She imagined she’d reread P.G. until the last trump. She sighed and lay back, cushioning her head with her arms, and closed her eyes. The sound of the creek and the feel of the soft summer air and the sun on her legs intensified with her eyes closed. A kind of exhaustion overcame her, and she let her mind drift.
There was the photo again of the paper in the dead man’s pocket. She could see perfectly the murky writing and though she tried to shove the idea away, she knew. She could not escape the thought. It wa
s her name.
The implications of that knowledge made her feel she was sliding down a long steep cliff of gravel, where she could get no purchase to save herself. She forced herself to look at what this meant. They knew where she was. She could be got at any time. She had thought this, vaguely, when Darling had first shown her the photo but now she allowed it, really allowed it. She tried to imagine herself back in London, at work, but it filled her with a dark sadness. She was happy here, and being back would only remind her of Angus. She realized that two years was not so very long after all. Perhaps her distance from London had given her the illusion that it was so long ago she’d gotten over it. This turmoil in her told her she had not. What it told her was that she missed him still, profoundly, if she but admitted it.
She went back again to that aching day when the girl from upstairs had said he was dead. No one had been able to answer any of her frantic early questions when she first heard, when she realized that she had no way to contact him. It was always the other way around. He always contacted her to make arrangements. Now, in the safety of distance, she wondered at his secrecy. With an angry flush she realized; he had been married. He must have been! Her whole love affair had been a lie.
She felt something hardening inside. Of course. It was her father all over again. He’d never told the truth to anyone. She’d fallen for a man just like dear old dad! She almost wanted to laugh. But now, here was the possibility that the agency was trying to reel her right back in so they’d sent someone here to get her, to drag her back into the world she had wanted to leave behind.
The likelihood of this was so absurd that she shook her head. It was also ridiculous that a man who was a complete stranger to her would have come here to seek her out, especially, only to be murdered by someone else in this tiny, out-of-the way community. It was back to the ridiculous and quite unbelievable coincidence.
