The Haunting of Maddy Clare

by St. James, Simone

“His personal effects will require taking care of. But before any legal issues can be addressed, I’m afraid someone must identify the body.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, aghast. “You must be joking.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not, I’m afraid.”

  “I can’t do that. Identify a body? Are you mad? I simply can’t.”

  Again he ran his finger along the edge of his papers. “Miss Leigh, I realize the idea is unpleasant. I admit these aren’t the exact circumstances I would have chosen. But it seems these are the circumstances we’ve been given. Your uncle’s body is currently housed at a magistrate’s office in Devonshire. We can’t move forward with any of his final wishes until the identification is done.”

  I tried to picture it—my uncle lying on a table in a shabby room, under a sheet somewhere—and failed. I pressed my hands to my temples. I felt ill, but I tried to buck myself up. I’d go to Devonshire, get this hideous experience over with, and come back to school. That was all. It wouldn’t be so bad.

  Then Mr. Reed continued on about wills, and final wishes, and cremation arrangements, and I felt a sickening twist in my stomach as everything suddenly got worse. A headache began to form beneath my fingertips.

  I was twenty-two, and a college student—a worse candidate for these tasks could hardly be found. I interrupted him midsentence. “Are you certain this is what my parents instructed? I’d think it is something they would want to handle themselves.”

  “It’s unorthodox,” he admitted. “But I don’t know your parents, Miss Leigh. I only know my client, your uncle, and him only through a few meetings over the years.”

  I sighed. Unorthodox only began to describe my parents. “What did you mean about his belongings?”

  “Yes, that. Miss Leigh, you are aware of what your uncle did for a living?”

  Embarrassment heated my cheeks. In my family we never spoke of Toby’s occupation. “Yes.”

  “He was staying in a small town called Rothewell. In Devonshire, as I say. I believe he was working on one of his unusual projects. He had taken rooms, which need to be emptied, and his things sorted and packed.”

  “Travel to Rothewell? It’s the start of the term. Can’t it wait?”

  “According to the landlady, I’m afraid not.”

  I stared down into my tweed-skirted lap. Somerville was the most prestigious women’s college in the country. Girls prepared for years to get in. As it was, I worked day and night to keep up with the workload; I was, quite simply, expected to succeed. To leave at the beginning of term was ludicrous. Perhaps someone could be hired . . . but no. Even at my most selfish, I wouldn’t have hired a stranger to go through my uncle’s things.

  “Miss Leigh,” Mr. Reed said, as if reading my mind, “I would not be here if there was another option.”

  My glance caught his hands, resting on the desk. He wore a wedding ring. He would take the London train home tonight and see his wife, possibly his children. He had family; so, in a fashion, did I. Toby had no one.

  I sighed and raised my head.

  Mr. Reed looked into my eyes and smiled. “Let me get the map,” he said.

  “That’s simply horrible,” my flatmate, Caroline, said when I told her the news. She leaned back against the dusty radiator and watched me pack my valise. “Did he really die of a broken neck?”

  “Yes. He fell from the cliffs at the town where he’d been staying.” I put the valise on the bed and opened it.

  “But what happened to the poor man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t they say? Do you think he—”

  “I don’t know.” I pushed the possibility away. “Is that my telegram?”

  “Oh, God— Yes, I forgot.” She took the paper I’d seen on the dressing table and handed it to me. “It just came. I’m sorry.”

  I tore it open. It was from my mother.

  Mr. Reed will be contacting you [she wrote, belatedly]. Please do as he asks. Toby likely left his affairs a mess. I don’t think there’s any money. Your father and I cannot leave Germany. The work here is too important. It’s only for a few days, darling, I promise. Please do this for us. Toby should be laid to rest by family.

  Family meant, in this case, me.

  “Jillian, you don’t look happy. Not more bad news?”

  I folded the paper, tossed it in my valise, and resumed packing. “Mother says they’re not coming home. I already knew that from the solicitor.”

  “So you really must go yourself.” Caroline took a cigarette case from her pocket and extracted one. She was blond, rounded, pretty behind the glasses she wore. “You know, I don’t know whether to be sorry for you or horribly jealous.”

  “Jealous? I have to see a body, Caroline. Then I have to pack up his dusty old things. I’ll be working nights for weeks after to make up for it, if I make it up at all. This will practically ruin my term. What is there to be jealous of?”

  “But you get to go do something,” she said, as she watched me stuff in yet another pair of stockings. “I get to stay here and listen to Mary Spatsby complain for the hundredth time that her room is drafty and she’s homesick for her old nanny, while I try to study twelfth-century ethics.” She lit her cigarette and inhaled shallowly, arranging it between two fingers to best effect.

  “Mary Spatsby is everyone’s burden to bear,” I said. “You must try to be noble about it.”

  “What was your uncle doing by the seaside?”

  I shut the valise, closed the latches, and lied to her. “Research. He was working on some sort of project, though I don’t know what it was.”

  “Mysterious.” She righted her tilting cigarette in her fingers and took another careful drag. I watched her from the corner of my eye for a moment, worried that she might pursue the question, but her curiosity had wandered elsewhere. Like me, Caroline came from a long line of academics, and everyone was always researching something. “You must tell me everything when you get back,” she said, “especially if you meet men.”

  I sighed, though I was happy to change the subject. “There won’t be men.”

  “Jillian, this is a women’s college. We see so few men here, it’s as if they don’t exist. If you even spot a milkman or a vicar, I want every detail.”

  I shook my head. I said friendly good-byes to the other girls I knew, my voice casual—oh, just an uncle I barely knew, that’s all—but as I took the omnibus that ran to the outskirts of town, I felt a strange squeeze in my heart. I had not allowed myself to think too much about Toby dying alone in a strange place, falling from a cliff. Or jumping. I stared out the window as Oxford receded, until I could see only the roofs of the chapels and libraries, and the green squares filled with undergraduates chatting in the cold autumn sunshine were gone from view.

  I got off the omnibus at the edge of town and walked half a mile to a small coaching inn. The landlord here, seeing an opportunity, had dismantled the stalls in half of his barn and cleared it out. For a fee, the empty half now housed motorcars—including mine.

  The remaining horses whickered restlessly as I pulled the canvas storage sheet from over the car and folded it. An aged groom smoked a cigarette and stared at me, leaning against the wall, watching me with a look that dared me to ask him for help. I stared back and said nothing. The car had been a gift from my father; he’d told me it was a reward for gaining admission to Oxford, but I’d always suspected guilt behind it as well. Even for my father, it was an extravagant present, and I was one of the only girls I knew who had even learned how to drive.

  Well, if my father was to make me settle Toby’s things without him, I’d take his guilt and drive it to Rothewell.

  I stowed the valise and the heavy books I’d carried and took a deep breath. There was nothing for it, then, but to go. I removed my hat and tied on a scarf, as my earlobe-length hair tended to curl when given its way, and the wind would have a heyday with it. I pulled on a pair of driving gloves and looked at the groom again. To my sur
prise, he gave me a nod.

  I got in the motorcar and drove away.

  I’d hardly had time to drive the roadster since I’d received it. It was sleek and picked up speed quickly. I had a long drive ahead.

  The town of Rothewell wasn’t in my Baedeker’s, but the maps provided by Mr. Reed showed it somewhere on the north coast of Devonshire. I made my painstaking way past Bath and Bristol, as the familiar countryside vanished, stopping every hour to recheck my way. This was nothing like sitting back in a train compartment, waiting to get off at your destination. I’d imagined myself flying down the road, carefree and easy. Instead I gripped the wheel, straining my eyes at rare road signs as I passed fields of grazing sheep and tidy hedgerows.

  At first, other motorcars passed me or came the other way—men in overcoats and goggles, a smart-looking fellow and his pretty blond girlfriend, a few rowdy boys waving at me and shouting quips I couldn’t hear—but as I got closer to the seacoast and turned along its quiet roads, the other cars all but disappeared, leaving me the roads to myself.

  Somewhere in the fourth hour, along the coast toward Exmoor, it began to rain, a light sprinkling through the heavy wet air of the sea. By then I would gladly have pulled over to wait out the weather, or even to spend the night, but there was no hotel to be seen. I trundled on as the roads got wetter, trying my best to see through the roadster’s windscreen.

  I was traveling through a landscape of thick woods, the leaves brittle on the trees in the long afternoon light, some of the branches beginning to lose their leaves altogether. As I stopped at one memorable crossing and waited for a farmer to move his cow from the road—he was most apologetic, and the cow most reluctant—I heard a sharp pattering over my head. I leaned from my window and looked up to see rain dripping from the undersides of the canopy of leaves, woven over the road, the branches bowing under the lowered wet sky. Where am I? I wondered.

  I rechecked the map. It was nearly useless. There were barely any roads in this part of England at all. How was I to know if the narrow inked line on a piece of paper corresponded with the two-track lane of mud I was currently following? I turned the map this way and that as the cow and its owner made their way off the road. I should try to keep the sea to my right. I could hear it and smell the salt in the air, though I couldn’t see the water through the thick trees. That was the best way, I figured, to stay in the right direction. I was pleased with my cleverness until I realized, too late, that I could have asked the farmer for directions.

  An hour later, the rain had not let up, and dusk fell. I came upon a crossroads and pulled over.

  I got out of the motorcar, tugged up my coat collar, and looked around me. The road each way was deserted. It had been so long since I had seen another car, I could have been transported to fairyland or backward in time. The air was purplish gray, the only sounds the rush of raindrops in the trees overhead and the crunch of my shoes on the gravel. I could no longer hear the sound of the sea over the rain.

  I huddled deeper into my coat. Here, in this desolate spot, the thoughts I’d been pushing away began to overtake me. Somewhere far off, a lark called. Toby had come this way. He hadn’t been researching a paper, as I’d told Caroline, and he hadn’t been on holiday. There was only one thing that could have drawn Toby to Rothewell.

  Ghosts.

  Your uncle was working on one of his unusual projects.

  Ghosts had been Toby’s business. It was the profession that shamed my parents, that none of us ever spoke of. The chasing of ghosts to all corners of England, as if it were science. As if it were real.

  My eye caught something by the side of the road. I pushed aside some underbrush with my damp, gloved fingers and revealed a sign, long neglected and fallen over. I pulled it upright and cleared it off.

  ROTHEWELL, it said.

  This was the way, then. I held the sign a moment longer, its dirt crumbling over my sleeve.

  Something rustled in the tall brush behind me. I dropped the sign and whirled, peering into the gloom. The stalks of the weeds bobbed where something had brushed by, but no other sound came. It had been only a rabbit, perhaps, or a mole, running from a predator.

  Still, my back prickled as I walked back to the motorcar, and as I drove off as quickly as I could, I imagined something silent watching me, from far back in the trees.