An Open Book

by Sheila Connolly

  Philip spoke up. “Uh, not exactly. Mr. Fairfield here thought it might be less of a shock if I showed up and talked to her first. He wasn’t sure if she’d be happy to see him. So that’s what I did.”

  “How did she take it?” I asked.

  “Fine, really. She asked me in, and we spent a lot of time talking. I was surprised how honest she was, since she didn’t even know me. She said she’d often thought about the baby she gave away, but she still figured she did the right thing. She wasn’t sure if Mr. Fairfield would come back, either to her, or at all, after the war. She wasn’t mad or anything—I mean, they’d only known each other a week. I think she was sorry that she and her husband never had kids, but she didn’t say so. Anyway, we got along great.”

  I could imagine Edith finding pleasure in that unlikely scene, and realized that the incongruous sodas in her refrigerator had probably been meant for Philip. But I kept silent: I had the feeling we were getting to the important part at long last.

  Vanessa apparently agreed. “So you told Edith about Mr. Fairfield, and you all got together here?”

  “Yeah. Mrs. Hathaway handled the news pretty well, so I told her that Mr. Fairfield was still alive, and I asked her if she wanted to see him again, and that if she did, he was here in town at his uncle’s old house. She looked surprised, and then she asked if she could think about it—alone. I said sure, fine, and I came back here and waited for her to call me.”

  “What time was that?” I asked.

  “After lunch, on Thursday, I guess. We’d spent the morning looking at old photos and just talking, and then I told her about Mr. Fairfield, and she said she’d let me know later. And then I left.”

  I looked at Vanessa. “Edith came into the library that afternoon and took out the book that Philip returned. She seemed fine.” She certainly hadn’t looked as though she’d just heard life-altering news.

  Philip glanced at me quickly, then went on, “Yeah, well, she called around five and said she would like to meet us the next day. Yesterday morning I went over and picked her up and brought her back to the house here. Then like I said, Mr. Fairfield asked me if maybe I could be somewhere else for a while. I was okay with that.”

  “Mr. Fairfield, what did you tell Laura? After all, you were her guests, and she barely knew you, and then you go and invite guests into her home?” Vanessa asked and glanced at Laura; Laura merely shrugged.

  “It might’ve been wrong of us, but she never knew Edith would be coming here,” said Edward. “She told me that she and the family had planned the shopping excursion, and I pleaded fatigue—I can get away with that at my age—and sent them on their way.”

  “That’s true,” Laura said. “I invited Philip to join us, but when he begged off I just figured he was staying behind to keep Uncle Edward company.”

  Edward nodded. “So you see, we didn’t have to make any elaborate excuses.”

  “What did happen?” Vanessa asked. “Mr. Fairfield, how did Edith die?”

  Edward sat back in his high wingback chair, looking like an ancient statue carved in stone. “We talked. We remembered. Then she said, ‘I want to go back to our place.’”

  Vanessa cocked her head. “‘Our place’? Where was that?”

  He looked over our heads, into the distant past. “We met in summer, and the grass was high. We used to climb the hill there and admire the view. Which has changed very little, I must say. And then we would hide ourselves in the tall grass and . . . I think you can fill in the rest. Our daughter was conceived there.”

  “How could you take a frail old woman on a hike in the snow? She’d had a hip replaced, for God’s sake!” Vanessa said.

  “She didn’t tell me. And she would have been angry if I had fussed. She was the one who proposed going up there. As you may well know, she was a strong-willed woman.”

  He was right about that. “So you went up the hill. And?” I prompted.

  “We went up there—a bit more slowly than in the past, I must admit. We admired the view, after we’d caught our breath. We talked a bit. And then she sort of crumpled, and she was gone.”

  “How could you know she was dead? Couldn’t you have gone for help? Or called someone?” Vanessa demanded.

  “My dear officer, I don’t possess one of those cell phone things. I knew it would take me some time to make my way down the hill, and I knew there was no one home in any case. I came back to the house and took a moment to catch my breath, and by then I could see someone up on the hill, and shortly after that you appeared. I certainly didn’t intend to just leave her there, but by the time I was in a position to call for someone to do anything about it, I could tell it was already in your capable hands. In any case, at my age I’ve seen death often enough. It would have made no difference. She didn’t suffer.”

  Of course that was the moment Vanessa’s cell phone rang. I think we all jumped, so absorbed were we in Edward’s story. Van fished it out of her pocket impatiently and looked at it, then stood up quickly. “I have to take this.” She stalked off into the hallway, lifting the phone to her ear. No one spoke in her absence; what was there to say?

  Van was back in under two minutes, and dropped into her chair. “That was the coroner’s office. Turns out the guy on duty had Edith as his teacher, so he put her at the head of the line.” She turned to face Edward. “She died of a blood clot in her heart. Even with blood thinners, it happens with people who’ve had a joint replaced. Could have happened anytime, even while she was sitting in her own living room. So it wasn’t the climb that caused it.” Vanessa paused to let Edward digest this fact before going on. “Just for the record, what did you do next?”

  Edward’s gaze looked past us all. “I sat with Edith for a time, remembering her as she was. It had been so long . . . and the time we had together was so short. Then I tried to decide what I should do. I went back down the hill, but by then I was exhausted—it was snowing just a bit, if you recall—and by the time I felt strong enough to call, I saw your vehicle’s flashing lights on the road in front of the house, and I knew that someone had found Edith.” Then he turned to me. “I’m very sorry, Sarabeth, that you had to find her like that. It never occurred to me that anyone else would pass by so soon, and I didn’t see you coming.”

  Vanessa insisted on following through. “What did you tell your great-grandson here? Didn’t he ask where she was?” Philip looked startled by Van’s attention, and glanced at his great-grandfather again.

  “When Philip returned, I said only that Edith had gone home. I gather your crew had left by then, so he didn’t see them.”

  “Mr. Fairfield, you should have told me!” Philip looked like he was trying not to cry.

  “You’re right, Philip. But I wasn’t sure how you’d take the news, and I hadn’t made up my mind how I would handle the whole situation.”

  “Were you planning to talk to the police, or were you just going to walk away?” Vanessa demanded.

  “To be honest, I don’t know. I must have been more shaken than I realized. As you might imagine, it’s been a rather stressful few weeks—I had not had time to properly absorb all that had happened. Philip finding me, learning of our daughter, and that Edith was still living in Strathmere. I had hoped to make amends, but I was not granted time to do so. I’m sorry if that caused you trouble, Chief Hutchins. Laura, I apologize that I inadvertently brought you and your family into this unfortunate situation.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments. Edith had lived among us for decades, and as far as I knew, no one in town had known about her baby. Then nearly seventy years later, a teacher in another state assigned a school project which ended in Edith’s death on a snowy hill. Had she finally achieved closure for that long-ago episode, and, knowing that her child had prospered and the family had gone on, had Edith felt she could finally let go? I felt bad for Edward and Philip: the elder having just learned the story, only to see Edith die; the younger to be thrown late into an unexpected drama with tragic consequences.
I wondered how much he would include when he turned in his project report.

  “What happened to Edith’s purse?” the ever-practical Vanessa asked.

  “It’s here—she left it behind when we climbed the hill. I was going to turn it over to you,” Edward said.

  “And the library book?” I asked gently.

  “I found it in the car,” Philip answered. “It must have fallen out of her bag. I tried to take it back to Mrs. Hathaway’s house, but she didn’t answer, and I didn’t want to leave it in front of the door in case it got wet. I figured it’d be safer at the library, and I knew where that was.”

  I smiled at him. “Edith did always want to have something to read on hand. Thank you for returning it. And thank you both for your explanation.”

  “Do we face any charges?” Edward looked at Vanessa.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “The coroner said it was natural causes, and he’s not going to make a fuss.” She hesitated before adding the standard phrase, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “You’re very kind,” Edward replied.

  Vanessa stood up. “We should go so I can write all this up. You two driving back to Ohio?”

  “I wondered if perhaps there would be a service of some kind for Edith?” Edward said. “If so, I would like to attend.”

  “I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be,” I answered. “If nobody else steps up, I’ll see that there’s something planned. I’m sure it would be well attended. I’ll give you a call and let you know.”

  He smiled at me. “Thank you.”

  Laura, recognizing that the conversation had finally run its course, came to her feet. “I’ll see you out.” She followed us to the front door, then asked in a low voice, “Is Uncle Edward in any trouble?”

  “I don’t think so,” Van said. “I’m not going to make things difficult for him.”

  “That’s good. I’m sorry we didn’t know anything about it—you could have wrapped this up faster if we’d only come home a little earlier.”

  We’d made it out the door when Philip came out and ran to catch up. He thrust a piece of paper toward me, and I saw a phone number on it. I let Vanessa go ahead of me before I spoke to him. “Was there anything else, Philip?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah, kind of. You knew Mrs. Hathaway pretty well, didn’t you?”

  “As well as anyone else in town these days, I suppose.” She’d kept all of us in the dark about some rather important things, but I would have called her a friend. “Why?”

  “Well, you know, I only just found out she existed, and now she’s gone. You think maybe I could get in touch with you sometime and you could tell me more about her?”

  “I’d be happy to, Philip. She was quite a lady. You let me know and I’ll be happy to talk with you, or email, or whatever you prefer.”

  “Thanks,” he said shyly, then retreated back into the house.

  Poor Laura—unknown relatives showing up on her doorstep, followed by a body up on the hill and police coming to call? And people thought that life in a small town was so peaceful. Little did they know!

  Vanessa and I drove back toward town. I thought for a while about how to go about planning a memorial service for Edith, and then another thought struck me. “I wonder if Edith left a will.”

  “Probably. I was going to track down that lawyer on Monday. Why?”

  “I wonder if she’d made any provision for the heirs of her daughter.”

  “Huh, I hadn’t even thought of that. It’s a long shot, but you never know. Funny about how the things you do early in your life come back to bite you in the butt,” Vanessa said.

  “Does that mean you’re hiding any deep, dark secrets in your past?”

  “No, not me. You?”

  “Nary a one. My life is an open book.”

  Vanessa dropped me off at my house, since she had picked me up in the morning. Henry was waiting for me, with a fire going in the fireplace and more good smells coming from the kitchen. “Where’ve you been? I was beginning to worry.”

  I came into his arms. “I thought it was my turn to cook!”

  “I figured you might have other things on your mind,” Henry said, holding me close.

  “You heard about Edith?”

  He nodded. Word travels fast in a small town.

  “There’s a lot more to the story.”

  “I’ve got plenty of time.”

  And now a special excerpt of Sheila Connolly’s first County Cork Mystery . . .

  BURIED IN A BOG

  Available in paperback February 2013 from Berkley Prime Crime!

  Maura Donovan checked her watch again. If she had it right, she had been traveling for over fourteen hours; she wasn’t going to reset it for the right time zone until she got where she was going, which she hoped would be any minute now. First the red-eye flight from Boston to Dublin, the cheapest she could find; then a bus from Dublin to Cork, then another, slower bus from Cork to Leap, a flyspeck on the map on the south coast of Ireland. But she was finding that in Ireland nobody ever hurried, especially on the local bus. The creaking vehicle would pull over at a location with no obvious markings, and people miraculously appeared. They greeted the driver by name; they greeted each other as well. Her they nodded at, wary of a stranger in their midst.

  She tried to smile politely in return, but she was exhausted. She didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. She was on this rattletrap bus only because Gran had asked her to make the trip―just before she died, worn down from half a century of scrabbling to make a living and keep a roof over her granddaughter’s head in South Boston. Now that she thought about it, Gran had probably been planning this trip for her for quite a while. She had insisted that Maura get a passport, and not just any passport, but an Irish one, which was possible only because Gran had filed for an Irish Certificate of Foreign Birth for her when she was a child. What else had Gran not told her?

  And what else had she been too young and too selfish to ask about? Gran had never talked much about her life in Ireland, before she had been widowed and brought her young son to Boston, and Maura had been too busy trying to be American to care. She didn’t remember her father, no more than a large laughing figure. Or her mother, who after her father’s death had decided that raising a child alone, with an Irish-born mother-in-law, was not for her and split. It had always been just her and Gran, in a small apartment in a shabby triple-decker in a not-so-good neighborhood in South Boston.

  Which was where Irish immigrants had been settling for generations, so Maura was no stranger to the Boston Irish community. Maybe her grandmother Nora Donovan had never shoved the Olde Country down her throat, but there had been many a time that Maura had come home from school or from work and found Gran deep in conversation with some new immigrant, an empty plate in front of him. She’d taken it on herself to look out for the new ones, who’d left Ireland much as Gran had, hoping for a better life, or more money. The flow had slowed for a while when the Celtic Tiger—the unexpected prosperity that had swept the country and disappeared again within less than a decade—was raging, but then it had picked up again in the past few years.

  Maura suspected that Gran had been slipping the lads some extra cash, which would go a long way toward explaining why they’d never had the money to move out of the one-bedroom apartment they’d lived in as long as Maura could remember. Why Gran had worked more than one job, and why Maura had started working as early as the law would let her. Why Gran had died, riddled with cancer after waiting too long to see a doctor, and had left a bank account with barely enough to cover the last bills. Then the landlord had announced he was converting the building to condominiums, now that Southie was becoming gentrified, and Maura was left with no home and no one.

  It was only when she was packing up Gran’s pitifully few things that she’d found the envelope with the money. In one of their last conversations in the hospital, Gran had made her promise to go to Ireland, to tell her friend Bridget Nolan that she
’d passed, and to say a Mass in the old church in Leap, where she’d been married. “Say my farewells for me, darlin’,” she’d said, and Maura had agreed to her face, although she had thought it was no more than the ramblings of a sick old woman. How was she supposed to fly to Ireland, when she wasn’t sure she could make the next rent payment?

  The envelope, tucked in the back of Gran’s battered dresser alongside Maura’s passport, held the answer. It had contained just enough cash to buy a plane ticket from Boston to Dublin, and to pay for a short stay, if Maura was frugal. Since Gran had taught her well, she didn’t think she’d have any trouble doing that. How Gran had managed to set aside that much, Maura would never know.

  She’d buried Gran, with only a few of her Irish immigrant friends in attendance, and a week later she’d found herself on a plane. And here she was. Maura was surprised to feel the sting of tears. She was cold, damp, jet-lagged, and—if she was honest with herself—depressed. It had been a long few weeks, but at least staying busy had allowed her to keep her sadness at bay. She’d held on to her couple of part-time jobs until the last minute, but she had made no plans to return to them; that kind of work was easy enough to find, and she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to stay in Boston. Gran had been her only relative, her only tie to any place, and with Gran gone Maura was no longer sure where she belonged. She was free, if broke. She could go anywhere she wanted, and with her work experience tending bar and waitressing, she could pick up a short-term job almost anywhere. The problem was, she didn’t know where she wanted to go. There was nothing to hold her in Boston, but there was no point in leaving either.

  Maura looked out through the rain streaming down the windows. She’d always heard that Ireland was green, but at the moment all she could see was gray. What had Gran wanted her to find in Ireland?

  Since Gran had never really mentioned any people “back home” to Maura, she’d been surprised to find a bundle of letters and photographs stashed next to the envelope with the money, where Gran must have been sure that Maura would find them. Sorting through them after Gran’s death, she had found that the few photographs were ones she had seen no more than once or twice in her life, but luckily Gran had written names on the back; most of the letters had come from a Bridget Nolan, with only the skimpiest of return addresses—not even a street listing. Taking a chance―and wanting to believe that someone in Ireland would still care―Maura had written to the woman about her old friend Nora’s death and her wish that Maura make the trip to Ireland to pay her respects there. Mrs. Nolan had written back immediately and urged her to come over. Her spidery handwriting hinted at her advanced age and suggested that Maura shouldn’t delay, and it was barely two weeks later that Maura had found herself on the plane. And then on a bus, which passed through small towns, cheerfully painted in bright colors, as if to fight the gloom of the rain. Most often it took no more than a couple of minutes to go from one end of the town to the other, and between there was a lot of open land, dotted with cattle and sheep and the occasional ruined castle to remind Maura that she was definitely somewhere that wasn’t Boston. The towns listed on the road signs meant nothing to her. She was afraid of dozing off and missing her stop. Mrs. Nolan had given Maura sketchy instructions to get off the bus in front of Sullivan’s Pub in a village called Leap, and they would “see to her,” whatever that meant. The bus lurched and belched fumes as it rumbled along the main highway on the south coast, though “highway” was a rather grand description: it was two lanes wide. More than once the bus had found itself behind a truck lumbering along at a brisk twenty miles per hour, but nobody had seemed anxious about it; no one was hurrying.