An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  He was pointing at two girls who looked older than the others, perhaps seventeen or eighteen. “They married and moved up the lake somewhere, then their father died and their mom went to live with one of them. I don’t know why Bob’s sister, Isabel, isn’t in this picture. Helping out at home that day, perhaps.”

  Lane put the album on her lap and turned each page carefully. The first pages were given over to individuals from the previous century posed on chairs next to occasional tables with books and vases. The Armstrong ancestors, she assumed. On the third page was an oval portrait of a young woman that, in spite of the formality of the setting and her stiff corseted gown with its high lace collar, showed someone relaxed and smiling, as if captured just before the cameraman said, “Ready?” It was a face of such beauty and sweetness that Lane exclaimed, “Who is this beautiful young woman? What is she, seventeen? Not above twenty, certainly!”

  “That is Kenny’s mother,” said Eleanor, coming into the parlour. “You wouldn’t think it to look at him, would you, the old goat. She never changed, really. She was as sweet as she looked in that picture. It was shortly after that that she married Lord Armstrong. The way she told it, it was quite the society wedding.”

  “Are there pictures of it here?” Lane asked, turning the pages.

  “There was one picture, now that I think of it. Mother had it in the sitting room. It must still be there in one of those boxes in your attic. They didn’t think much of all the fuss and came out here to get away from all that nonsense. You should wait for a good rainy day that keeps you indoors and rummage through to see if you can find it.”

  Warm at the anticipation of this new rainy day project, Lane continued, “Here, these are all from here. There’s my house being built! No gardens, no willow tree; just the cleared forest. How wonderful! I must get a copy for my wall. Okay, here’s a picture of people having lunch outside. Who took that?”

  “There we go,” said Kenny. “That was the year we built the cellar. Mother took it, I expect. She was mad for that camera. There’s Bob, John, me, Mabel, Gwen, Gladys, looking imperious even at that age, and these two are Andrew and Isabel. That lad was right underfoot, I remember. There was a younger child in that family as well, now that I think of it, maybe seven or eight? Must have been home with the mother.”

  “How pretty all the girls are!” Lane exclaimed, thinking of Gwen and Mabel as they were now, wiry and grey, the faint vestiges of the glowing energy and innocence of youth visible only in their eyes. The people in the picture were seated around an outdoor table, all looking up at the camera expectantly. The young men were dressed in work clothes, loosely buttoned shirts and suspenders, the women and girls, bar Isabel, had aprons over pale dresses. Lane could see the corner of the garage, the wood still light, where they had moved all the jars and baskets the day before.

  “And here’s another picture of the school. That’s John and the younger Anscomb children, including that youngest one. What was his name? John? No, Joe, I think.”

  “Where is the schoolhouse?”

  “Up that path by the fork in the road. It’s a bit of a walk, but we all did it, rain, shine, snow, hail. And nothing daunted Mother. She could have gone round by the road, but she walked up that path every day. We always went early, especially in the winter, to light the stove, and in the warmer weather to open the windows. She liked to sweep the floor before everyone arrived. She thought it set a workman-like tone for the day. I haven’t been up there for thirty years. I doubt anyone has. Once we all grew up, and the Chases and Anscombs and most of the other early families left, it all fell into disuse. That stove you have in your sitting room was the school stove. When we lived over in your house we’d use the fireplace or sit in the kitchen.”

  WHEN LANE LEFT, she carried a loaf of brown bread, a gift from the Armstrong oven from the afternoon before. She stowed this in her breadbox, hovering for a moment with the thought of slicing off the heel and covering it thickly with butter. She was still full of tea and the scone she’d had. She would do something to earn her bread and butter first. She would go find the school and have a look at it.

  The sunlight that had been intermittent after the rain had strengthened, and Lane now stood at the crossroads just above her driveway. She wanted desperately to go up to the Hughes house, where she knew Darling and Ames and a crew were carefully digging up the remains. She had stood with the others the afternoon before, watching the two policemen back down the driveway, receiving no special notice other than a wink from Ames. She turned toward a path she had never taken before, which wound upward behind and away from the Hughes’ property, and with a determined assertion of independence, strode off on her walk.

  The underbrush was still wet, but the path was clear because of the winter die-off of the grasses and ferns. It was hard to tell if anyone had been using it recently, but the path was well established and must have been used a great deal in the past. It wound gently upward between what she calculated were the Hughes’ orchards and the meadows that might be the bottom of Reginald Mather’s property. He had never gone in for apples like the other residents of King’s Cove. He had always, she knew, had dreams of exploiting the dense forests that surrounded them to open a sawmill. Much to everyone’s relief that dream now seemed to be dead.

  She reached an intersection where a trail wound sharply down to the right. That must go directly to the post office, she speculated. She continued winding gently upward and through a stand of trees. The air was soft and cool and was beginning to smell earthy and alive. Lane felt her mood lifting, as it always did when she walked. The path opened up into a meadow, and at the top was a log cabin with a covered porch that was listing as if it had shifted in a major snowfall and had never been put right. The place had an air of such desertion that Lane stopped, momentarily overwhelmed by the weight of the silenced voices of the past. The old photo of the children, booted and scarved against the cold, was taken right in front of these steps. She could barely conjure up an image of the life children would have given this desolate place.

  She held the post supporting the rickety porch and tested the steps gingerly. They creaked, but held. She pushed the door and, with some effort, was able to open it. The smell of mould pervaded the dark interior, and when she got used to the darkness, she could see why. A box and two trunks of books and papers lined the walls, their lids propped open. The only furniture was a small table on one side of the room in front of a slate board and a box by a section of the floor paved with a square of bricks. The stove, her stove, which kept the children warm during the winter, must have stood here. All other furniture that might have been there had long gone, she supposed. There were only two windows, and one was covered with dingy flowered curtains. She pulled these back and knelt in front of the first box. It contained primers and small individual slates. This surprised her. When had the school ceased operation? Surely if it was open between the wars they would have moved past slates? The trunks contained sheet music, spotted with dots of black mould: “The King,” “Danny Boy,” “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” “Over There.” It must have run right up to the Great War, then. Below that Rachmaninoff and Beethoven. She looked around, wondering where the piano might have been and if Lady Armstrong had practised these classical pieces when the children had gone home. She heard the Beethoven “Emperor,” her favourite, in her head, imagined it rocketing about in this small space. You couldn’t haul a piano up that path. The road Kenny mentioned must be behind the school. She would check before she left.

  Below the music she could see copybooks, and she gingerly lifted the pile of sheet music and put it on the floor, her vague anxiety about having trespassed somewhere she didn’t belong now overtaken by a sense of excitement. She had known this feeling since she was a small child. With an absent father, she had been brought up alone, but for her younger sister, in a rarefied world of governesses on an estate that included garages, workshops, and barns, which she explored with solitary wonder when she had esca
ped the eagle eye of those overseeing her education. She never remembered her sister being with her. It was as if they lived in two separate worlds.

  Assuming that these would be unused copybooks, she pulled up the first one and was surprised to see the name “John Armstrong” written in a careful childish hand, followed by the date, 1903. Lifting others, she found Kenny’s and Robin Harris’s as well. Beneath these were names of the people Gladys mentioned, the Anscomb children, Isabel, Robert, and Andrew. The date on these was 1909. Beneath these were some blank books, and then several more with the same names, and one with the name “Joseph” neatly printed by an adult, perhaps for a child who was too young to write. This she opened and found a lesson begun in desperately awkward and strained printing, “A is for animle,” and then nothing more, as if Joseph had given the whole thing up as being too difficult. She leafed through Kenny’s book, and saw his geography lesson in a good strong hand, and then picked up John’s—John, who had never returned from the Great War. “Cairo, Egypt, a place I would like to go one day,” he had written. What would he have been in 1903? Ten?

  Saddened by the childish hopefulness of this lost boy, she put the copybooks back, wiping her hands on her trousers, suddenly longing to be out in the fresh air to clear her nose of the cloying smell of mould and her heart of melancholy.

  Should she take the books back to Kenny? The nascent archaeologist in her decided no. She should leave the place as she found it. But she would tell him about the copybooks, ask about what it was like to go to school there. As she approached her own gate, her head was still full of the schoolhouse. It had occurred to her that perhaps, if that was a child they were digging up, that child might have used one of those little copybooks she had seen. So distracted was she by this haunting line of thinking that she did not see the maroon Ford that was pulling up to the gate in her driveway until she nearly bumped into it.

  “Miss Winslow!” Ames had gotten out of the car and was greeting her enthusiastically. “His lordship’s up there supervising the dig,” he added, in answer to the glance she made at the car.

  “I’d much rather see you. Come in. How’s it going?”

  Ames glanced longingly toward the house, and finally said, “Yes, but just for a minute. You don’t have some coffee on, do you?”

  “I can have some in two ticks. Come on. Don’t let yourself be bullied by him! Help yourself to the lav if you’d like to wash up.”

  Ames disappeared gratefully into the bathroom, and Lane washed the mildew smell off her hands in the kitchen sink and put on the percolator. She firmly put aside her feelings about Darling sending Ames instead of coming himself. Of course he was busy at the crime scene. Ames returned and sank into one of her kitchen chairs, which seemed barely able to support his tall frame.

  “He’s actually sent me to see you,” he said.

  “Ah,” she said, busying herself with cups and milk and sugar.

  “He thinks you might be able to get some background information a bit better than we could. You know, exploit your friendships a bit.”

  “Exploit? Your word or his?” The coffee pot had made its first tentative “plop” sound.

  “Mine, I suppose, sorry. He’s going to have us asking the usual round of questions, but it’s an unusual situation. People are going to answer what we ask, presumably, unless they are guilty of this thing, but we can never be sure of asking the right questions, especially when we’re having to explore something that goes so far back. I, in the meantime, have been stuck in the dusty archives looking for reports of missing children from that period, whatever that period is. He’s got the pathologist, Gilly, up there. I don’t know how much he’ll be able to determine.”

  Thinking that she could not imagine that anyone she knew here, even the vaguely smarmy Reginald Mather, could have been guilty of killing whoever it was and hiding the corpse in a neighbour’s garden, Lane said, “I don’t know how much local knowledge I have. I imagine the Armstrongs would certainly be happy to chatter away about the old days, especially if they thought it would make them associate detectives. I cannot assume they might not have been involved. In fact, I’ve inadvertently already got a bit of a start. We went through all the photos Kenny has of Cove children from the early years. But perhaps I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I should learn to stay out of things unless asked!”

  “Miss Winslow, he trusts you implicitly, or he wouldn’t have sent me.”

  Lane felt, she knew not what, and then answered brightly, “Well, you could knock me down with a feather.”

  “I know he doesn’t always show it. Okay, he never shows it, but I know he was impressed with your work on the Russian matter.” What Ames didn’t add was how devastated Darling had been when Lane was nearly killed working a recent case. She had been enlisted to help with translation after a local Russian was found dead at the nearby hot springs. Ames still marvelled at the sheer bravery and quick thinking that had saved her and the pregnant girlfriend of a kidnapper from certain death on a dangerous road.

  He’d never said it, but Ames thought he knew his boss pretty well. What he couldn’t understand, especially at this minute, gazing at Miss Winslow’s beautiful profile, framed by her dark auburn hair, was why Darling didn’t get on with what was obvious to everyone.

  “You can tell Inspector Darling, after you’ve had your coffee, that I will do anything I can.” She eyed the glass top of the percolator. “Does that look dark enough for you?”

  July, 1910

  “Not there, you goose, farther along, in the shade.” Mabel took up her end of the green kitchen table and they moved it under the oak, which extended a circle of dappled shade along the edge of the front garden, by the garage. The heat was oppressive, and the decision to eat outside in the shade gave the whole proceeding a celebratory air. They pulled the table leaves out so the table would seat everyone. She stood with her hands on her hips surveying the scene; her long, heavy, golden braid had fallen forward, and lay down the front of her apron. She tossed the braid back and pushed the curls of her fringe off her forehead and watched the men working.

  Gwen, who had caught her darker hair loosely at her neck with a black ribbon, stooped down to play with the cocker spaniel, who was a bit overwrought with all the activity.

  The horses had been unhitched from the wagon and were grazing in the west field, oblivious of the industry in the yard. Their part, hauling the lumber up from the wharf where it had been delivered by the steam paddlewheeler, was now over. The bed of the wagon was still piled with lumber, as the old cellar had been demolished the day before, and the digging for the expansion was still in progress. Dirt was piling steadily as Henry Anscomb and the boys worked.

  “Look,” said Gwen, shading her eyes, “Isabel and Andrew. How are we going to have room for them?” A boy and girl were coming into sight along the path through the young orchard, which was adjacent to where the horses had stopped eating to watch them.

  The boy, an irrepressible twelve-year-old, ran forward. “Are we eating outside?”

  “You’re not eating anywhere, Andrew,” Gwen said. “What have you done to help?”

  “We brought cherries!” He pointed back to where his sister followed up at a more decorous pace with a blue and white striped bowl of cherries.

  “Nice of you to make her carry them all that way. Nothing for you! She’ll have your sandwich.”

  “I wasn’t going to let him carry them,” Isabel said. “He’d only drop them. He’s clumsy. This is our best bowl.”

  “You’re clumsy!” he retorted with apparent good nature, and he ran toward the work party.

  “Thanks, Isabel. You can help us. Put the cherries over there,” Mabel said, heading back toward the house. She had a soft spot for prickly Isabel, who was sixteen.

  Gwen was not so patient. “She is as sullen as can be in class. Poor Lady Armstrong is so kind to her,” she had complained in the fall.

  In the kitchen, their mother—looking incongruously cheerful becaus
e of the white apron covering the black widow’s frock that she had worn since her husband’s death the previous winter—produced a pile of egg and lettuce sandwiches, which were resting under a cloth on the long counter by the sink. She was pulling the lid off a tin of seed cake when they came in, letting the screen door slam. “Prop that damn door up,” Gladys Hughes said. “We can’t have it banging all day.” Mabel pushed another piece of wood into the stove and put the kettle on. Two large brown teapots were ready on the counter.

  “Hello, Mrs. Hughes,” Isabel said, standing by the sink, her hands in the pockets of her apron, her black curly hair pulled away from her face. Bangs curled over her forehead emphasizing her dark eyes. Her small face at rest was always serious, as if she were anticipating some unexpected threat.

  Why did that girl always look so uncomfortable, Gladys thought, looking at her, “Hello, Isabel. Your mother all right?”

  “Yeah, she’s all right. She stayed home.”

  “Yes, I can see that. And little Joe? Why didn’t he come? We’ve lots to eat.”

  “He’s home too. He’s not feeling well.”

  “Well, it’s good of you to come and help.”

  “Here, you take these,” Mabel handed Isabel the tablecloth and napkins and then pointed at the drawer. “Gwen, get the forks. Will we need knives? I’ll bring the plates.” On the way across the yard, Mabel called out to Andrew, “You can help with the chairs and benches. Maybe we’ll let you have something to eat then.”

  Andrew, feeling that Mabel’s warning was in earnest, carried chairs one by one from the kitchen and then helped Gwen with the two benches that were kept in the garage.

  Called to lunch, the work party went around the back of the house to the tap. Gladys was arranging the food on the table. “Better take them some towels,” she said to Mabel. “They’ll be unusable after they finish with them,” she added glumly.