Improvisato

by David Crossman

  In the interval, Mrs. Ruakari had asked to be called Cindy. “I don’t know what I can tell you about Tan,” she began, “that I haven’t told the police. She’d run off the rails about the time she turned seventeen, and I lost any kind of control.” She looked at something in the near distance. “Now this one’s not far short of her fifteenth birthday, and, well, you can see for yourselves.”

  “Teenagers,” said Angela whose later teen years had been spent so far off the track, she couldn’t even hear the train whistle. “She’ll come ’round.”

  “You think so?” said Cindy. “That girl has too much of what God gave her, and she’s, well, she loves watching its effect of people. Men, and that.”

  “I noticed,” said Simon.

  “I bet you did, Reverend. Probably put a twist in your cuirass.”

  Both Simon and Angela happened to be sipping their tea at the moment and, with explosive laughs, sprayed it liberally about the lawn, alarming the goldfish.

  “Yes, well,” Cindy continued, wiping the residue from the table with her napkin, as if it was a common occurrence. “Of course, I was young once, too. But there were limits in those days. I don’t know. Their dad’s gone the better part of the year; he works the quarries out in Oz. So he’s not around to lay down the law. I try it, and they just laugh. I say ‘they’. Of course . . . it’s only Colleen now.”

  “Can you tell us a bit about her? Tanny?”

  Cindy studied the tea in her cup. “She wasn’t a bad girl. Not soul-bad, you know?” She looked at Simon, who nodded. “But there was something missing in her. Whatever it is inside that tells us, you know, not to jump off a cliff, or swim with the sharks.

  “She didn’t seem to have that . . . thing.”

  “A conscience?” said Simon.

  “Oh, I don’t think I’d say that. She could be sorry enough, after the fact, if she hurt someone or something. I mean, even if she was late for tea, she’d be genuinely sorry. Apologizing all the time, and that. But it was always after the fact.

  “No. It was going into a thing she had no judgment about.”

  “Damn the torpedoes?”

  “Exactly,” said Cindy, looking up at him. “Acted on impulse. No thought for the consequences.”

  “Is there any way you think that could have led to her accident?” Angela asked.

  “Accident?” Pause. “Hmm. If it was.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Cindy looked meaningfully from one to the other of them. “Wait here a minute.” She got up and went into the house and, when she returned, was holding a small silver object in her hands. She set it on the table, where it caught the sunlight.

  “A ring?” said Angela, reaching for it. She turned its face toward her and looked at the insignia. “‘F’? Who’s ‘F’?”

  “Search me,” said Cindy. “I never saw that before I went through her room after she died.”

  Angela handed the ring to Simon. “Any idea what it might mean?” he asked.

  Cindy shook her head.

  “But, what about it makes you think her death might not have been accidental?” said Angela, taking the ring back from Simon. “It looks pretty innocuous. Maybe some boy gave it to her.”

  “That’s what I thought. Until I read this.” Cindy took a small notebook from the pocket of her apron and handed it to Simon. “Her diary. I didn’t go in her room for a while after the . . ., after she . . .”

  “No. Of course not,” said Simon. He placed his hand on her shoulder, and she leaned into it slightly. “That would have been very painful for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Cindy, putting her hand gently on his with an almost imperceptible squeeze, a brief intimacy at the conclusion of which Simon withdrew his hand. She touched the diary. “I’ve marked the page.” A silver chewing gum wrapper protruded from a point about midway through the book. He opened it as reverently as he would a Bible. “The last entry, on the 19th.”

  “‘F’ wants me again. I’ve a good mind to tell them where to get off. They’re just using me.” Simon read aloud. “Them? ‘F’ is a ‘them’?”

  Cindy shrugged. “I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  “Did you show this to the police?” Angela asked, taking the diary from Simon and scanning it.

  “No. It was four or five weeks after she died that I finally got up the crust to go in her room.”

  “I’m surprised the police didn’t find it when they searched her room,” said Simon.

  “Search? What search?” said Cindy. Clearly she was struggling to keep her emotions in check. “As far as they were concerned, she was just a cleaning girl who tripped on her laces and fell down the stairs. Case closed. They never searched her room. Never asked a question of anyone, as far as I know. Why should they?

  “But now,” she said, tilting her head toward the diary.

  At that moment, a small envelope—the kind graduation announcements come in—fell from the book onto the table. “Pressed flower in there,” she said.

  Simon picked up the envelope. “May I?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He opened it and shook the contents out onto the table.

  “Chatham Island forget-me-not,” said Cindy. “Myosotidium. I looked it up. It only grows out there.” Simon turned the envelope over in his hands. “Don’t bother. There’s no address or addressee. No postage or anything. Just that ‘F’ on the tab there.”

  “It might have fingerprints on it,” Simon reminded himself, returning the envelope gingerly to the table where he bent over it and examined the letter that had been hand-written in pencil. “Where did it come from?”

  “I don’t know. It was there,” she nodded at the diary. “In the same page—the 19th.”

  “Sounds like a boyfriend,” said Angela.

  “Not likely, unless it was a secret admirer,” said Cindy. “She had a boyfriend, Ricky Smethurst. Not the flower-sending type.”

  “No ‘F’ in that name,” said Simon.

  The three of them sat sipping their drinks and staring at the pathetic little scraps of memorabilia testifying to the former existence of a girl named Tanny Ruakari.

  Angela had been studying the ring. “What’s this?” she said, holding it close. “Looks like one of those little twisty things.” She held an imaginary screwdriver and twisted her wrist.

  “Twisty things?” said Simon. She held the ring up for him to look at. He put on his wire-rimmed glasses and, steadying her hand with his own, inspected it closely. Impressed clearly in the metal, though so small as to be easy to miss at a glance, was a nut of the kind that holds metal components together. “Oh, well, yes. Sort of. Not a screw though. A nut.”

  “A nut?” said Cindy, taking the ring proffered by Simon. She looked at it closely. “Oh, I thought you meant like a macadamia or walnut or something.” She squinted at it. “You’re right.” She handed it back to Simon. “I didn’t notice that before. Do you think it means something?”

  “Well, I suppose it must,” said Simon. “Else why go to the bother of putting it there.” He twiddled the ring between his thumb and forefinger. “An ‘F’ and a nut. What could that possibly mean?”

  “Don’t forget the flower,” said Angela.

  “Yes. A forget-me-not.” Simon took a deep breath, held the air in his ballooning cheeks, and let it out slowly.

  “A Chatham Island forget-me-not,” said Angela. She looked at Cindy. “Do you think they came from the same place?”

  Cindy shook her head sadly.

  “I can’t make any sense of it,” he sighed. “Do you think he can?”

  “He, who?” asked Cindy.

  “Albert.”

  “Oh. Right. Well, I don’t hold much hope. An ‘F’ and a nut on a cheap tin ring.”

  “Silver, actually,” Angela interjected. “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Silver? Really?” said Cindy. “Well, that and a flower’s not much to go on.” Her sight settled on the sorry souvenirs. “Not much, is it
?”

  “May I borrow these? I promise I'll return them,” said Simon.

  Cind's native suspicion rose and, regarding him closely, fell. “Sure. Why not?”

  Simon nudged Angela, and rose. “Well, Mrs. Ruakari . . . Cindy, we’re so sorry to have intruded on you like this. Thank you so much for your time.” He held out her hand, which she took in hers and used to pull herself up.

  “I go days without talking about her,” she said. “That’s all I did at first, until poor Col had enough. Said she never wanted to hear her sister’s name again, and told me to get on with my life.” The gaze with which she fixed Simon was deep and laden with meaning. “I needed to talk about her again. Ta.”

  “Of course,” said Simon. “I understand. Did you . . . is she buried nearby?”

  Inwardly, Angela recoiled, half expecting the grief-stricken woman to erupt with accusations that he could have no possible understanding of her pain and loss. That’s not what happened. Instead, the she leaned into him, and he embraced her as if he’d been expecting it. Then she began to weep, soaking his shoulder with her tears.

  Angela felt as if she should leave the room, to allow Tanny’s mother the privacy her private anguish deserved, but she was transfixed, unable to take her eyes from Simon, who laid his chin on the woman’s head and just held her. No shoulder pat. No whispered “There, there, now. Pull yourself together.” No attempt to extricate himself from what—especially for an Englishman—might have been an exquisitely awkward situation. He was a headland of compassion against which a tsunami of sorrows rose, and broke, and fell. When the storm clouds parted, she said, “There’s a little cemetery not two blocks from here. That’s where she is. They haven’t put the marker down yet. There’s just a little vase with a dozen white roses in. I put them there fresh every week, on Tuesdays.”

  “I’ll stop by and say a prayer for her, if you don’t mind,” said Simon.

  “No, Vicar. You do that. Maybe . . . maybe I’ll go along with you one day.”

  Next thing Angela knew, they were at the front door. Cindy was wiping her eyes and welcoming them both—by which she meant Simon—to come again anytime. Unobtrusively, Simon withdrew a calling card from his pocket and placed it on the small, semi-round hall table.

  For a while, they walked in silence along the tree-lined road toward Parliament Row. “You know what I’m thinking?” Angela said at last.

  Simon laughed a monosyllabic laugh. “No end of possibilities!”

  “I’m thinking about you, James. How much you remind me of that precious old church of yours back in England.”

  The expression that formed on Simon’s face in response to this comment encompassed a host of emotions. “Well, given that we’ve already determined that the old girl is decrepit and has holes in her bonnet, I’m not sure how I should take that.”

  Angela smiled and took his hand. “Nothing bad, James. Nothing bad.” Pause. Beat. Breath. “It’s a good old church,” she said, leaving him to wonder what that might mean.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “What do you make of Tanny,” said Simon at last, “as a murderess?”

  “If she’s anything like her kid sister, I’d have a hard time crediting her with anything requiring much advanced planning.”

  “So, you don’t think she could have . . . could have killed those women, her employers, cold-bloodedly like that?”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Angela. “You never know what drives people to do the things they do.” She knew that better than most. “I’ll say this much—at least based on what little we know—especially the fact that she was so distressed, and reading that entry in her diary—it wasn’t off her own bat.”

  “You think she was working with someone?”

  “Or for someone. Or,” said Angela as the thought occurred to her, “under someone’s thumb.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Maybe. Coercion of some kind. Threats perhaps? Against her life, or the life of someone she loved? Like I said, there are any number of things that will drive people to desperate acts. Force them, even.”

  Simon sopped up this reality with a sigh. “Yes.” They walked on. “What do you make of Tanny’s little odds and ends?”

  “Sad little collection, isn’t it? Dried flowers . . .”

  “Not just flowers,” said Simon. “Forget-me-nots. That’s significant, I think. At least, it might be.”

  Angela nodded. “True. Then the ‘F’ on the envelope and the ring. They must signify the same thing.”

  “Must.”

  “And the nut? What the heck could it all mean?”

  “‘F’ is ‘them’,” Simon thought aloud. “More than one person. A group? An organization or association of some kind?”

  “Let’s go with that,” said Angela who, without thinking about it, began to walk a little faster. “Back to what I said earlier, if we accept that ‘F’ signifies a group, and that Tanny said they wanted her again, but she was going to tell them where to get off, or whatever . . .”

  “What if she did?” said Simon.

  They stopped, looked at each other, and, both speaking at once, said: “And they killed her.”

  “Because she refused to do what they wanted her to do!” said Simon.

  “Which was . . .what? Make widowers of the husbands on Parliament Row?”

  “No. I don’t see it.”

  “Nor do I, I guess. Just thinking out loud. It’s all about body parts.” Immediately, he had another thought. “If the flowers were from ‘F’, then they were a message to Tanny. ‘Forget-me-not.’ Forget what? Certainly not forget who they were, she knew that, sure enough. Forget not what, then?

  “And why Chatham Island forget-me-nots?”

  Angela shrugged. “Forget what they wanted her to do? Maybe it was some kind of clue that was meant to trigger some action on her part. Another killing.”

  “Or it might have been a threat,” said Simon. “Forget not what we have over you, and we’ll follow through on our threat if you don’t do as we wish?”

  Angela nodded at both possibilities. “We need to stop thinking up questions,” she said, “and come up with some answers.”

  Suzie looked much better than the last time he’d seen her, Albert thought as Jimmy introduced them. Of course, she’d been mostly dead then, and soggy, so probably anything would be an improvement.

  “You find me,” she said. “On water.” She made a gesture that, to her, meant beach.

  “On the beach,” Albert replied. “In a green dress.” Angela had said it was green, so he felt this a safe declaration. Women knew colors.

  The girl smiled. “Yes. It was for party. That when I hear about I get heart. But I not want.” She told him of her escape and, as one who had known the ocean’s embrace, he found the experience so visceral he wanted a towel.

  “What’s your name?” Albert asked. He felt uncomfortable sharing intimate conversation with someone whose name he didn’t know. Given her speech patterns, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d said “Pocahontas.”

  She looked quickly away. “Suzie.”

  “No. That's not it,” said Albert. He only had room for one Suzie in his life, and that place was taken by Mr. Sweetman’s late wife. Of course, he might make room on his mental shelf for a living Suzie and a dead Suzie. That would make them sufficiently distinct from one another.

  “I tell you. Suzie,” she said.

  Albert let it go. He knew she was lying, which was interesting in itself. He’d never before been able to tell if someone was lying. He’d had suspicions, yes, but he’d never been as sure as he was now. Maybe it was because she looked away when she spoke. Maybe she was just a bad liar, which, Albert thought, was a good thing to be.

  “Why did you want to see me?”

  “You help.”

  “How?” he said and, as soon as the word was out of his mouth, laughed aloud, startling the girl. He thought it might take greater skills of communication that he possessed to
explain the connection between the thought that she spoke like an Indian and the word “How,” so he just let it go.

  “What funny?”

  “I’m not, not the kind of person people go to for help,” he prevaricated, and then said aloud what he was thinking, which was self-congratulatory: “That was pretty good.”

  Suzie’s eyebrows tumbled toward the bridge of her nose, but she decided it was probably due more to her lack of familiarity with English than with incomprehensibility on Albert’s part. “You save me,” she said. “But I not want heart.”

  “She’s said that a lot,” said Ngaio.

  Albert, however, had recent experience to interpret for him. “You were supposed to have an operation?” he said. “Your heart?”

  Suzie’s hand went to her chest. “Not want. Not mine! Not mine!”

  “Somebody else’s heart?”

  She nodded, and hung her head. “Somebody killed. They give me that heart.”

  “Someone who hadn’t been asked if they could have it,” said Albert.

  “Makes sense,” said Mikaere, “about what she’s been saying. Not wanting a heart, and that. She means she didn’t want the heart of someone who’d been killed for it.”

  “Yes! Yes!” said Suzie. “That right. I die. Okay. I die. But not want . . .”

  Jimmy put his arm around the girl’s shoulder. At first she stiffened, but he kept it there and, within seconds, she leaned into him.

  Albert wondered what it must be like to have a woman melt against him like that. He and Miss Bjork had never had the chance to share that level of intimacy. They’d hugged, but that wasn’t melting like the Vietnamese girl and the Maori boy. Esperanza had melted into him, in a way. That is, she spooned against him in the bed they shared sometimes, and held him. She’d been comfortable, but never warm.

  She was a ghost, after all and, for all he knew, spent her days in the grave. Graves are probably cold.

  He thought of his mother’s grave, and shivered.