by Iona Whishaw
Robin was in his barn when she arrived, working in the light of a kerosene lantern. He looked at her with his fallback expression, irritation. Lane produced an enormous smile and said, “Good evening, Robin. Hard at work as usual.”
“You don’t seem to have much to keep you busy, if you’re here to bother an old man like me.” He pulled off a pair of cracked and weathered gloves and put them on the seat of his tractor, and then stood with his hands on his hips. “What do you want?”
“As a matter of fact, I think you might be able to help me. I’ve just been to see Reginald, and he hadn’t got much to say, I’m afraid. But I think you might know a good deal more.” She felt only mildly guilty about her attempt to stir up Robin’s contempt for Reginald.
Robin snorted and took the lantern and started out the door to the house. “He’s a waste of your time. You’d better come in.”
They climbed his back stairs into the spartan kitchen, pulled out a chair. The lantern cast a warm glow. She should get one, Lane thought, imagining all the homes lit like this in the old days.
“Now, what are you after?” Harris asked.
“It’s about the child they dug out of Gladys’s cellar.”
She pulled out the photo of the locket and placed it before him. “This was the locket that, strangely, was around the neck of the skeleton. Now, Gwen seems to remember that a girl named Isabel Anscomb used to wear it. Gwen herself was only sixteen, so the memory is obviously a bit fuzzy, but maybe you remember something about it, or anything about the family, really.”
Harris took the photo and peered closely at it, his wire-rimmed glasses sliding to the end of his nose. “Can’t say I remember any locket. I’m not much for that sort of thing. I remember the Anscombs though, because I was pretty friendly with that older boy. He was kind of akin to me in spirit, I guess. Had a bit of a temper, did Bob, but we used to fish and ride and so on, when his father ever let him off the lead. They came here to try to grow fruit. No aptitude. But I remember Bob used to get saddled with a lot of the work because all the other children were too young. I used to wonder how he put up with it. I mean, we all worked hard, and so did Bob, even not knowing what he was doing, but he had a funny attitude to his father. Not disrespectful, exactly, but you got the feeling he was thinking he could bugger off any time he wanted to if he felt like it, and no one could stop him. They only lasted a few years, getting poorer and poorer.”
“And do you remember Isabel at all?”
“You know, I haven’t thought about them for years, but now you’ve brought them to mind, Isabel was a hard girl to ignore. She was small and very pretty. Dark curly hair. I think I could have been a bit sweet on her. John liked her too, but he was really all for Gwen. That Anscomb girl was very aloof. Didn’t smile much. Didn’t seem happy except around her brothers. Bob was pretty protective.” Robin almost smiled, “In fact we had a donnybrook one night after a dance down at the hall. I think he thought I was trying one on with her.”
“Were you?” Lane asked.
“I don’t honestly remember. I was young. I could have been. Long time ago. Now I think their mother . . . now that mother. I saw her a few times because I went up there to try to help from time to time when I could be spared here. She was a sad thing. Always tired, all those kids to feed and care for. Then she had that baby. Andrew? No, that was the one right behind Isabel. There was that smaller one. Joe? Maybe Joe. He was weak or something and had to be cared for at home. He wasn’t a bad little chap. I remember him trying to help in the garden in his own little way. His mother was very impatient with him, but I suppose that was her tiredness. He seemed a bit sad, but cheerful enough when he was with me and Bob. That’s where Bob’s good points came out. I mean, he was a good worker, but he was extra kind to that Joe. Always including him. We’d give him little jobs. Fetch a hammer or some wood. Get us water, that sort of thing. Andrew helped out too, but he was completely different. He seemed strong, even for a small boy. You could see he felt sorry for the little one and tried to play along, but honestly, it was like a stork put him there. Like he was from some other family. The whole family was strange. Like they’d been assembled from bits and pieces from all over and sent out by the good Lord to try to make a go of it.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FEELING SHE’D DONE A GOOD job of work, Lane put aside the notes she had made, put her toast plate from breakfast by the sink, and contemplated phoning Darling. The day was looking like it would be sunny, and she had developed a growing curiosity about the house where the Anscomb family had lived. She decided that a trek to the house would be easier than a phone call to Darling, which always gave her a case of the butterflies. In any case, she might find out something useful. Of course, the minute she thought it she knew it for the excuse it was. It was absurd to imagine anything could be gleaned from a house that had been empty for forty years.
Lane had last seen the house in the winter, when she had snowshoed past it on the way to an abandoned cabin she had heard about. It had looked almost romantic then, surrounded with billows of untouched snow. Now, even on a sunny morning, it looked sad and bedraggled, the garden overgrown with tussocks of yellow and limp grass. The dark overhang of the porch looked forbidding and unwelcoming, instead of refreshingly shady in the bright glow of the spring sun.
Even knowing that no one had lived in it since before the Great War, Lane looked nervously behind her before she climbed the four steps onto the porch. She knew that after all those years there would be no trace of the Anscombs. It surprised her that no other families had lived there in that time. Whoever owned the house had put it on the market because it was one of the two houses she’d been shown the year before when she bought her own place. Certainly no effort had been made to make it saleable. She had not even asked to see the inside, so put off had she been by the dark abandoned aspect of it. It was tucked into a thick stand of forest with only a small space cleared for a garden, and a view only of the road down toward the lake. There was a small, unkempt, and over-grown orchard attached to the property at some remove, she recalled.
The front door, a fading red, was padlocked. Lane lifted the lock, looked at it, and let it fall with a bang against the door. It left a smear of rust on her hand, which she wiped on her trousers. The windows on either side of the door were curtained, a bleached-out flower pattern adding to the sense of abandonment. She could just see a section of the floor, dark wood planks, and an overturned apple box. She smiled. They were ubiquitous, these boxes. Her own basement had a stack of them, and they were piled in the Hughes garage and Angela Bertolli’s basement. Everybody seemed to have them, whether they harvested apples or not.
The yard sloped slightly upward toward the back and was completely overgrown with rotting plant life. There must have been a garden, she thought. It was hard, looking at the desolation, to imagine what the Anscombs had made of the garden. Certainly a family could not have survived easily without one. A dark stained woodshed was situated thirty feet behind the house and an outhouse stood beside it, the door off one of its hinges, gaping open. On the edge of the clearing, backing into a thick stand of trees, was a larger shed. For tools, she thought. She tried a door at the back of the house and to her amazement it opened after only a slight struggle.
She saw immediately why it had been left unlocked. It opened onto a tiny mudroom, mint-green paint bubbling and peeling from the walls, a small wood box in the corner. She pushed at the kitchen door, knowing it must be locked, only to find that it, too, opened. The air in the kitchen was dense with cold and silence. A wood range stood against one wall, looking incongruous with its shiny beige enamel oven door. It had a wooden table upended on top of the cooking surface. Once inside, the darkness was explained. Unlike her kitchen, where large windows graced the north wall and French doors the east, letting in floods of light and a view of the lake, this kitchen had only one small window that looked out at the woodshed.
Lane shivered both from the cold and the thought of wha
t it would be like to live here. She immediately chided herself and tried to think of it alive with the sound of children, the stove lit, a cat on a chair somewhere, but she could not shake her initial sense of the misery of this ungenerous, dark space. The tiny sitting room she had seen from the front window was dark as well, and though windows looked out toward the road, the heavy roof of the porch shadowed them.
Only two little rooms led off the front room. How many people had lived here before the Great War? At least seven, she calculated. The Anscomb parents, the oldest boy, Bob, the sister, Isabel, Andrew, and then two other small children that the Hughes said they rarely saw. Where had they all slept?
The darkness and cold gave the whole place the air of a tenement. No wonder the mother was miserable! Lane moved from the front room into one of the little bedrooms. She was assailed with the smell of mildew and saw that its origin was probably the dank mattress—riddled with holes and with tufts of stuffing pulled out—still on the small iron bedstead. A home for rodents. She shivered involuntarily and looked at the rest of the room. A makeshift wardrobe had been fashioned in one corner with a wire strung across the corner of the room and a water-stained beige curtain hung on one nail, looking as if it had been ripped open suddenly.
In the second room the bedstead had been upended and lay on its side against the wall. A box sat at an angle to a dark corner of the room, looking as if it had been shoved there, or, she thought in a burst of dark fantasy, had scuttled there on its own to get away from the desolation of the place. Shuddering, she was about to retreat back to the sitting room when her eye was caught by something behind the box: a child’s boot.
She pulled her sweater over her mouth, beginning to be troubled by the mildew that pervaded the house, and leaned over to look more closely at the boot. She could not recall seeing anything more forlorn. It was clearly that of a child, the leather stained and nearly ossified by time, the tongue hanging out and laces gone, abandoned by the retreating family. Perhaps whoever had worn it had outgrown it.
Standing up, she surveyed the room and walked slowly back through the kitchen. She tried to imagine the family leaving. Before the Great War, Gladys Hughes had said, so perhaps 1911 or 1912. It would have meant piling their possessions and the family onto a wagon. They would take everything that would fit: one mattress or two perhaps, but no unwieldy metal bedsteads or much in the way of large furniture. Cooking supplies, clothes. They would trundle down the hill, the wagon being pulled by, say two horses, and then would have to get themselves and their possessions onto the steam paddlewheeler at the wharf. She shuddered at the effort of it all.
ONCE OUTSIDE, SHE felt her mood lift. She closed the door to the kitchen and then the outside door, feeling a little as though she was locking the ghosts of the past firmly away. Who would ever want to buy this house, once they had been inside? She was about to begin the trip home when she caught sight of the woodshed. With an air of delinquency, she wondered if there was dried wood she could pilfer for her own stove. The shed was composed of dark, weathered planks of fir, and the door was firmly shut. Lifting the latch, she pulled the door back and saw that the back half of the shed was full of un-split logs that were stacked against the back wall. The splitting block was pushed against the pile, and enough split wood to fill her wood basket lay scattered across the floor. Picking up a piece, she could feel that it was a little damp, but it would dry in no time if they got a few sunny days. She would come back with the car and collect some.
Toward the back of the abandoned garden, there was another shed. It was twice the size of the woodshed, but was also constructed of rough-hewn boards that had darkened over the years. She took the one step up to the door and pulled it open. Her brows wrinkled. It was the smell, she decided. It wasn’t a bad smell, but it was a . . . live smell. Like someone had recently been there. She moved cautiously to open the door as far as it would go to let in light and quietly said, “Hello?” She knew there would be no answer as the place was obviously deserted, but her sense of caution was high at this unexpected discovery. In the shaft of light that illuminated the interior she could see a lump that might be a bedroll, a canteen, maybe a pot of some sort. There was a box of crackers and a tin of coffee that was knocked over, its contents spilling into the dark corner. The floor was a rough plank floor, obviously designed to keep any items placed here off the damp ground. As her eyes became accustomed to the dark, she could see that there were still some remnants of its original use. A two-man saw hung on one wall, a rusty wash tin was upended near the door, and farther in she could see that other things, which she could not identify in the obscurity, were stacked against the back wall. There was a kerosene lamp on a nail by the door, its glass shattered.
She closed the door and looked around the damp, dishevelled yard, more alive now to the possibility that someone had been, probably quite recently, squatting here and could be watching her even now. Between Erin helping herself to the beach house and whoever was squatting in this tiny, uninviting shed, Lane began to wonder if any abandoned property in the area was safe from intruders.
Dusting her hands on her trousers and shaking off the feeling that someone was hiding in the bush watching her, she turned back onto the road. This discovery called for a visit to the Armstrongs. Perhaps this person was the old man Erin had seen in the lake. Everyone seemed to come to the attention of Kenny and Eleanor sooner or later, and though she would be surprised if they knew of someone camping in an abandoned woodshed and hadn’t told her, she could not suppose that she would be made privy to every secret.
KENNY, ELEANOR, AND Lane sat on the back porch enjoying the expanding morning. It was such a contrast to the rank darkness of the Armstrong property that Lane decided it was one of her favourite places in the world. Kenny had lifted the screens, and they sat looking out at the nascent back garden and the lake beyond it. The contrast was absolute. The air was redolent with the warm smell of new plant life. The teapot stood on the little round table in front of them. The lemon oatmeal cookies added to the sense of the coming spring.
“Must have been an awful shock for the girl,” Kenny said, chuckling. “A naked old fellow like that.” Eleanor rolled her eyes and shook her head slightly. He continued, “But as to who it could be, I’m afraid I’m at sea. I’ve not seen anyone out, either up here or on my runs to the wharf. And now you tell me you think someone might be camping out in the shed at the old Anscomb house. Got to be the same guy.”
“I wonder how long he’s been here,” Eleanor remarked. “I can’t believe no one has caught sight of him before this. Mind you, you get some odd ducks all up and down the lake . . . Trappers, would-be miners, and the like. I imagine he’ll move on when he realizes there’s not much to be gained here. Or Ponting will get nervous about his own claims and move him on.”
“Gwen came to see me in a hush-hush sort of way yesterday evening, and I’ve been to see Reginald and Robin. Are you interested in what I’ve found out so far?” Lane asked innocently. “In fact, you might be able to add to it.”
“You’re a dark horse. Yes, we jolly well are!” exclaimed Eleanor, pushing the plate of cookies in Lane’s direction, as if to fuel her efforts.
Worrying only slightly that she was inching into the realm of gossip, Lane began. “Gwen must have remembered something after I’d been to see the three of them, because she came roaring down to tell me she thought she might have seen the locket on Isabel Anscomb. She seemed anxious to avoid having her mother and sister know. Now that I think of it that speaks to something going on there. Like they have secrets from one another . . . hmm. Well, that gave me impetus to go see Reg and Robin. Reginald was his usual charming self, but it seems he didn’t know the Anscombs well because apparently he went back to Blighty around that time to marry Alice, who, by the way, was resting inside, so we had to talk on the front porch. Robin remembered a bit more because he apparently used to go up to help every now and then, and he remembers being chummy with the older boy, Bob. He didn’
t remember about the locket.”
“Yes!” Kenny said, remembering. “Of course he was. Mother was a bit worried about that Bob’s influence on Robin. Robin was already inclined to a bit of sulkiness in his teens, and she imagined they’d be off getting into trouble. In the end it didn’t amount to much. Bob was good enough. I recall him being a strange combination of high-spirited and secretive, but he did have a real temper. He could be sarcastic too, but I thought underneath he was a bit sad. Do I mean that? More, guarded, maybe. ’Course in that family, who wouldn’t be sad? They never seemed to get a leg up.”
“Being in that house this morning gave me the absolute heebie-jeebies,” Lane said. “I cannot imagine anyone ever being happy there . . . tiny miserable house, tiny miserable garden. Robin said they only stayed for a few years, and I can’t say I blame them.”
“That’s right. Left before the war. The last time I remember us all doing something together was, funnily enough, building Gladys’s root cellar. That was in 1910.”
“So who were all the children? So far I know about Bob and Isabel, then Andrew, and Robin said he thought the younger boy, whom he remembers only seeing at their house, was called Joe, and then he thought there was a baby.”
“That’s about right. And that unhappy mother and the father, Henry, who I think made a genuine go of it, but things never fell in their favour.”
