Fruit Cake and Fear

by Agatha Frost

  “I think he’d like that,” Alistair said as he forced himself out of the chair. “I should be going. It’s pill time in twenty minutes. It’s all fun and games when you get to my age, dear.”

  Julia helped Alistair out of the chair and handed him his cane. Not wanting to let him walk all the way to the nursing home alone, she called and paid for a taxi, and sent him on his way with the rest of the Battenberg cake to share with the other residents.

  “You want to speak to Aiden?” Barker asked with an arched brow. “I thought you were leaving this alone.”

  “I am,” Julia insisted. “But I’m involved whether I like it or not. I did find her body, Barker. Wouldn’t you want to look that person in the eye if you were Astrid’s boyfriend from twenty years ago?”

  Barker opened his mouth to object, but he knew she was right. He retreated into the kitchen, no doubt looking for the coffee. When he did not find it, he sulked back into the dining room to continue with his furious typing.

  Julia had thought confirmation that it was Astrid’s body would bring her some peace, but it did not. It still did not explain how she had ended up underneath the café, or who had paved over the basement door.

  Reminding herself of the promise she had made to prove Roxy and Johnny wrong, she continued measuring out the ingredients for the cake and pushed Astrid to the back of her mind.

  5

  Julia strolled into the village the next morning with her finished fruit cake in hand. Milky clouds blocked off the sky above, bringing a chill to Peridale. It signalled the end of summer and the imminent beginning of autumn.

  She approached her café and looked through the dark window from behind the crime scene tape. The white forensics tent had been removed, allowing her new bike to have been returned to her, but she had been instructed to stay away from her café until they were finished with their examination of the basement.

  “It’s such a shame,” Shilpa, the owner of the post office, said as she watered the flower boxes under her shop window. “Do you have any idea when you’ll be reopening? I miss your cakes.”

  “Soon,” Julia said with a forced smile. “I hope.”

  Julia left her empty café and set off up to the road towards Evelyn’s B&B. It began to softly rain as she passed The Plough. She paused and looked up at the sky, regretting her decision to leave her umbrella at home.

  “That’s her,” Julia heard someone whisper. “She’s the one who found her.”

  Julia turned to the group of elderly women who were sitting under a parasol at one of the tables outside of the pub. She spotted Amy Clark amongst them, but she refrained from looking in Julia’s direction. Julia gritted her jaw, wondering why she was being diplomatic, but she shook her head and continued on her journey to the B&B. The village was going to gossip about her regardless, and she would only add fuel to the fire if she commented. She had wanted to give Amy Clark a piece of her mind ever since she had ruthlessly broken the heart-breaking news to Evelyn, but she was waiting for the right moment; this was not it.

  Leaving the old women to gossip, Julia approached Evelyn’s front door, where the sign in the window had been switched to ‘NO RESERVATIONS’. Julia yanked on the chain, the musical doorbell ringing throughout the cottage. Julia had come prepared to be ignored entirely, so she was surprised when she heard footsteps heading towards the door, and even more surprised when a tall, slender man answered it.

  “Hello?” he said, brushing his shaggy blond hair out of his face as he stared down at her. “Are you one of the guests?”

  Julia smiled awkwardly at the man. Despite looking like a Kurt Cobain tribute artist, he appeared to be a similar age to Julia. He had red circles around his eyes as though he had recently been crying and Julia detected a faint scent of unwashed and twice-worn clothes.

  “Aiden?” she mumbled, squinting at the man’s face. “It’s Aiden Black, isn’t it?”

  The man stared down at Julia with an arched brow for a moment before snapping his fingers together and flashing her a smile.

  “Julie? The cake lady?”

  “It’s Julia,” she said, holding up the box. “But you’re right about the cake lady part. I brought Evelyn something I baked. I thought she might like to see a familiar face.”

  “You’re Julia,” he said again with a firm nod as he hugged his jaw with his palm. “I didn’t put two and two together. I remember you from school. You were in Year Eleven when I was in Year Nine. I remember you taking over a lesson of Food Technology when Mrs Hargreaves came down with the flu. When they said a woman called Julia found – found her under a café, it didn’t click.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Julia said. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now.”

  “You’d think having twenty years to get used to things would make it easier, but it doesn’t,” he said blankly, his eyes glazing over as he stared down at the cake box. “I think you might have wasted your time, I’m afraid. We came down with the same intentions, but Evelyn is – well, you know – she’s being Evelyn.”

  Aiden stepped aside to let Julia in. She kicked off her shoes, remembering how Evelyn liked to regularly shampoo her carpets. She placed them next to the burn marks from the fallen incense sticks, making a mental note to buy Evelyn a bigger doormat to cover them.

  “We brought flowers, but it seemed to make her worse,” Aiden whispered as they walked down the long hallway to the sitting room. “Threw them straight into the bin.”

  “Evelyn doesn’t like cutting flowers. She thinks it’s torture.”

  Aiden looked down at her with a smirk, which he quickly dropped when he realised Julia was not joking. They walked into the dark sitting room, the only light coming from small tea light candles circling the table Evelyn was sitting beside the bay window. Her grey hair flowed free, and she was wearing a black kaftan as she mumbled under her breath with her hands clamped to a crystal ball.

  Julia recognised the woman with curly black hair sitting on the couch as Aiden’s wife.

  “She’s been doing that since we got here,” she whispered. “It’s Julia, isn’t it?”

  “It is. You’re Doctor Black.”

  “Please, call me Grace,” she said with a polite smile. “I haven’t seen you in my surgery for a while. Did that rash on your hand clear up?”

  “Turned out I was allergic to pistachios,” Julia replied as she rested the cake on the coffee table. “What’s she doing?”

  “She said she’s trying to contact Astrid,” Aiden said, his tone disapproving. “I think that’s all she’s been doing since it happened.”

  “Poor woman.”

  “I know,” Grace said with a heavy sigh. “We were so upset when we heard the news, but we can’t even imagine what she’s going through. If I lost one of my boys, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  Aiden squeezed his wife’s shoulder as Grace dabbed at the corner of her eyes with a shredded tissue.

  “I remember you all being friends,” Julia said, recollecting everything Roxy and Johnny had reminded her of. “The Three Musketeers according to your uncle.”

  Grace looked up at Aiden. They shared a sweet smile before they both began to cry. Julia almost wished she had not said anything.

  “Sorry,” Grace said through her tissue with a strained laugh. “It’s been twenty years, but we never gave up hope.”

  Julia glanced at Evelyn and noticed that her eyes were now open. She stared down at the crystal ball, but she appeared to be looking right through it.

  “Hope,” Evelyn croaked, her eyes wide and unblinking. “I always had hope that my daughter would walk through that door one day with amazing stories of the life she had experienced away from this village. My hope is dead.”

  Julia suddenly looked down at the floor, guilt flooding through her. Would it have been better if she had never found Astrid? She hoped her guilt was misplaced, but Evelyn was a shadow of the woman who had handmade her a birthday card and forewarned of a storm.


  “At least we have some closure now,” Aiden said hopefully, even if his twisted expression said something else. “We won’t go on wondering forever.”

  “I liked wondering,” Evelyn snapped, suddenly turning and facing them. “I never dared search for Astrid’s spirit because I could sense she was still out there somewhere, but I was wrong. Now that I’m looking, I can’t find her. I cannot connect! They won’t even let me see her body.”

  Julia refrained from telling Evelyn it was probably for the best that she did not see her daughter like that. She had not been able to shake the image of Astrid’s skull staring back at her in the dark of the basement.

  “We should go,” Grace said, suddenly standing up. “The kids are going to be driving Mark up the wall.”

  Aiden nodded his agreement, and they both headed towards the door. If Evelyn noticed they were leaving, she did not let it register on her face. Her hands slipped off the crystal ball, and she folded in on herself in the wicker chair.

  “We shouldn’t have come,” Aiden said as Julia showed them to the door. “It was too soon.”

  “We’ve stayed away for too long,” Grace added, grabbing her coat from the hat stand. “We visited all the time in the early days, but you know what life is like, especially when you have three kids to raise.”

  “I’m sure Evelyn understands,” Julia replied with a polite smile. “She just needs time. Maybe try again next week. She’ll get used to seeing your faces again.”

  “Are you staying?” Aiden asked as he pushed up an umbrella after peeling back the net curtain of the window next to the door. “I think it’s going to take more than cake to get through to her.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  After the couple left, Julia walked through to the kitchen and opened Evelyn’s tea cupboard. She was faced with a dozen different varieties of tea in unlabelled plastic boxes. She opened a couple of the lids and sniffed the leaves, not wanting to pick one of Evelyn’s illegal hallucinogenic teas by accident. When she detected what she was sure was green tea, she found a tea strainer in one of the drawers and prepared a pot.

  With two plates, two forks, and a large knife, Julia carried the tray of tea through to the sitting room and set it on the coffee table next to Evelyn’s ornate tarot card boxes. She sliced two generous helpings of the cake and placed them on either side of the table before pouring the tea into two cups. When she was satisfied, she walked over to Evelyn and rested her hands on the woman’s shoulders, surprised when she let Julia lead her to the couch.

  “A nice cup of tea and a slice of cake will make the world of difference,” Julia said softly as she sat in the armchair across from Evelyn’s sofa. “When did you last eat?”

  Evelyn mumbled something and shrugged as she looked down at the cake. Julia picked up hers and demonstrated how to eat it. Like a child being taught for the first time, Evelyn copied and took a bite out of the cake.

  “Delicious as always,” she mumbled blankly as though it was an automatic response. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  Julia swallowed her mouthful of cake before sipping the tea. She waited a couple of seconds to see if the tea had any ill effects, only taking another sip when she was sure all of her senses were still as sharp as ever.

  “You can talk about her with me, but you don’t have to,” Julia offered kindly as she placed the teacup back on the table. “I was two years above her in school, but I talked to her.”

  “It’s a small village,” Evelyn said with a shrug, her eyes blinking slowly. “Astrid was all I had.”

  Evelyn feebly chewed another mouthful of the cake as though it were made from rocks and cardboard. She swallowed and let the plate slip off her knee and onto the couch.

  “Was Astrid’s father in the picture?”

  “He died,” she said bluntly. “Astrid was only a little girl.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Evelyn slumped back into her seat and tucked her long wiry hair behind her ears. “He didn’t know her, nor did he want to.” Evelyn’s eyes glazed over as she stared at the bright yellow teapot on the table, as though her mind was casting back to another time. “I was only sixteen when Astrid was born. I ran away from home and joined a commune in Liverpool. My parents were bankers. I wanted to be a hippie. I missed the movement, but there were still people out there living like that. The leader got me pregnant quite quickly. I didn’t realise until it was too late that it was less of a commune and more of a cult. You know the sort. He thought he was God, and we were his to use. I got out before Astrid was born. That’s when I found myself in Peridale. Father Patterson took me in and let me stay at the vicarage until I got myself on my feet. Worked as a shop girl at the post office until my mother and father died in a car accident. I inherited more than I deserved, so I bought this building and turned it into a B&B. I always loved having a house full of people, but maybe that came from my commune days. Turned out the commune was all a front for a drug smuggling ring and the leader, Saint John, as he liked to be called, was jailed. Cancer got him about thirty years ago. I only found out when I read about it in the paper. Astrid never knew him as her father.”

  “Did he know about her?”

  “He fathered over forty children,” Evelyn said with half a weary smile. “I doubt he knew a single one of them. I went to the funeral out of curiosity. It was pathetic. I was one of five people there. Two other women were from the cult, and the other two were women he’d been writing to from behind bars. I raised Astrid alone. I did the best I could, but I know people bullied her because I’m weird.”

  “You’re not weird,” Julia said quickly. “I don’t think you’re weird.”

  “You’re too kind,” Evelyn said with another half-smile. “You’ve always been so kind to me, Julia. I sense you’re not a believer like me, but I feel the energies and spirits of the universe running through my veins like you feel your blood, which is why I don’t understand why Astrid has never come through in all of these years.”

  “She will.”

  “What if she doesn’t?” Evelyn said, suddenly sitting up, her hair springing from behind her ears and hanging over her eyes. “What if she blames me? I tried my best, but what if I wasn’t enough for her?”

  “You can’t think like that.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “I don’t think she got into that basement by accident,” Julia said, almost regretting the words as quickly as they left her mouth. “You’re not to blame.”

  “The police won’t say it was murder,” Evelyn said, suddenly animated. She darted across the table to grab Julia’s hands, knocking over her teacup in the process. “But they’re not ruling it out. You’re a smart woman, Julia. You’ve done this before. You’re the only one who can find out the truth about what happened to my baby.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about –”

  “Please, Julia,” Evelyn said through gritted teeth as she squeezed Julia’s hand. “Promise me you’ll try. For me.”

  Julia’s mind cast back to Johnny and Roxy, and how foolish she had been to force herself to take a back seat to prove a point to her friends. Looking into Evelyn’s raw eyes, Julia knew the woman would not be able to rest until she knew what had really happened to her daughter, and if Julia could be the one to do that, it would help her sleep a little better at night knowing she had helped.

  “I’ll try,” Julia said. “But I can’t promise I’ll figure it out.”

  “You will,” Evelyn said as she let go of her hands. She leaned back in her seat and nodded her head furiously, her eyes glazing over as she fiddled with the hem of her black kaftan. “I know you will.”

  6

  Roxy and Johnny came around later that evening with two bottles of white wine and a large tub of chocolate ice cream; Julia was grateful for both.

  “Cake for dinner?” Johnny exclaimed as he looked around the half a dozen untouched cakes on the table. “I’m not complaining about that.”

  “I’ve be
en nervously baking.”

  “Remember when you nervously baked two hundred scones before our final maths exam?” Roxy said as she unscrewed the lid on the wine. “I spent that time revising like a madwoman. You still came out with a better result than me.”

  The old friends sat at the table and began their first slices of cake in between sips of wine, both of which they all seemed to need. Julia hoped the wine would give her the courage to confess the promise she had made to Evelyn that afternoon.

  “My mum found this in my old bedroom,” Roxy said as she rummaged through her large handbag. “I went back to Hollins for my work experience when I was at college. I ended up working on the yearbook team again.”

  Roxy slapped the ‘Hollins High School Class of 1997’ yearbook in between her chocolate cake and wine. Johnny instantly scooped it up and began flicking through the laminated sheets.

  “I’ve been working on a story to summarise the history of this case, and there’s definitely something weird going on,” Johnny said as he adjusted his glasses. “Astrid was supposed to meet Aiden and Grace at the war memorial in front of the church. They waited about twenty minutes for her, and when she didn’t turn up, they went to the prom without her.”

  “You’re not one of those who still thinks Aiden did it, are you?” Roxy mumbled after taking a deep sip of wine. “He was never charged. The poor guy will be carrying that around for the rest of his life. I’m not surprised he moved out of Peridale. The fella can’t even go to the shop without people pointing and whispering about him chopping Astrid up into little pieces.”

  “She wasn’t chopped up,” Julia corrected her.

  “Well, you get my point.” Roxy stretched back and yawned, tossing her bright red hair over her shoulders. “I’m so tired. This new school year has wiped me out. My new kids are nothing like my last lot. They’re out of control.”

  “Are you allowed to say that about six-year-olds?” Johnny asked with a smirk as he picked at the corner of a slice of carrot cake.