An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  Mabel looked nervously around the small space. Somewhere he’d found a rug, and on this he’d situated a couple of stools and a pile of blankets and some pillows. Where could he even have gotten these things? She’d been in the house once or twice and the squalor had nearly overwhelmed her. They barely had a rug for the floor. “Where did you get these things?”

  “I didn’t steal them, if that’s what you’re worried about. In fact old Lady Armstrong gave me some blankets she had and a pillow. She said she worried about all of us fitting into this little house, and I said I was old enough to go on my own, only I didn’t have nothing to do it with. She said she wished I could stay in the schoolhouse, because of the stove, only I said I needed to be here for the others, with the way things is going.” Bob jerked his head in the direction of the house. He turned back to her and pulled her toward him, bending to kiss her.

  Mabel felt herself gasp at the sudden force of what she felt, and pulled away. She sat down on the pile that was the bed and was surprised by how soft it was. She suddenly wanted to curl up here in the golden light and pretend she was in another almost unimaginable world, away from her boring life with her sister and her mother. She lay down, tucking herself part way under the blankets and thought about them together, older, and able to strike out on their own.

  Bob came down beside her, putting the lamp on one of the stools so the light threw a long shadow of him up the wall. Lying down, he pulled himself close to her, and she could feel his body pressed against her coat. He reached under the blanket, undoing her coat, pressing his limbs against hers. She allowed herself to be held and to be kissed, warmth flooding through her.

  “Listen,” he whispered, “first chance we get, we leave. I’m old enough now. I can look after you. First chance. Maybe right after harvest, so we know the Anscombs is okay.”

  Mabel greeted this with a puzzled look toward the door, beyond which lay the house, gloomy, sickly, hopelessly mired in a constant shadow. “Why do you say that as if they aren’t your family?”

  “Quit fussing” he took her face and turned it gently toward him. “Say yes.” He kissed her, feeling a rising hunger again.

  “Does this mean we’ll be . . .” She had a sudden fear of saying the rest of the sentence. She wanted to say “together, forever?”

  “You don’t need to worry about nothing, okay?”

  THERE WAS NO warning. The door was pulled open, and Henry Anscomb stood filling the doorway, the light of the lantern emphasizing the lines of his outrage. “Slut!” he shouted. He yanked Mabel up by the arm and pulled her out into the night. “You go back where you belong,” he said to her. “We don’t need you sticking your nose around here!”

  Mabel stumbled backward, trying to do up her coat running into Isabel who stared at her, her face contorted in disbelief. “Charlie!” Isabel said, pulling her gaze away from Mabel to Bob where he stood face to face with Henry. “Charlie, what is this?”

  Mabel found herself unable to turn away. “You whelp!” Henry was yelling, but Bob had him by the collar and had pushed him against the shed, his fist raised. The next moment Henry was on the ground where he’d been pushed, saying, “You will regret that for the rest of your life!”

  The spell broken and fear engulfing her, Mabel turned and ran.

  THE MEMORIES TUMBLED back. She kept thinking about Isabel. Isabel crying, Isabel shocked by seeing Bob kissing her, Isabel crying out “Charlie” on that horrible night. The fight over Isabel after the dance all those years ago. Isabel with the locket. Isabel. It’s what they all thought. She groaned and turned pulling the covers tightly around her, squeezing her eyes shut. At four she turned out her light and tried to breathe herself into calmness but was jolted awake again by the certainty that it hadn’t been a bear on the mountain the day before. It had been a human. As her thoughts rolled through why she suddenly thought this, she drifted into an exhausted sleep.

  “Mabel.” Her sister’s raised voice penetrated her sleep and Mabel opened her eyes, surprised to see that sun was pouring through the window. Ten in the morning. She heard Gwen again from the bottom of the stairs. “Are you getting up anytime today? Mother wants to discuss the garden. We have to think about getting the peas in.”

  “Yes,” Mabel called. “I’ll be down in a minute. Stop your caterwauling.”

  Gwen and Gladys were already outside, their breakfast done, when Mabel came downstairs. With a gargantuan effort of will, she pushed aside the misery of her night and mentally packed it into wherever she kept unpleasantness buried. What she didn’t put aside was the fact that she was sure now that the noise she’d heard in the underbrush in her walk up the hill with dogs was human. She drank her tea and, with some relief, put her mind to trying to imagine who would be lurking in King’s Cove, especially so far from anyone’s house. While the current denizens were becoming decidedly eccentric as they got older, none of them was, in her mind, a lurker. In a burst of independence she decided she would go straight down to Kenny. If someone were hanging about, he’d be likely to know about it. Perhaps some new homesteader had come and they simply hadn’t heard about it yet.

  “Where are you going?” her mother asked, as Mabel came out of the kitchen and started around to the back of the house. “We’ve got decisions to make here, what with everything all at sixes and sevens.”

  “I imagine the two of you can cope. I’ve got to go see Kenny.”

  “She’s behaving very peculiarly,” Gladys complained to Gwen. Gwen felt herself not above the same criticism and said nothing, watching her sister’s retreating back. But she agreed. Something was up with the way Mabel had been moping about lately.

  At the post office, Mabel found Alice Mather just leaving, swinging her walking stick in that vaguely dangerous way she had. Alice glanced at her, lifted her stick in salute, and then continued up the hill. Well, at least she was out and about, Mabel thought. Must be between “spells.” Inside, Lane was chatting with Eleanor, and they both looked up, smiling, when Mabel came in. “I need to see Kenny.”

  “And good morning to you, Mabel,” Eleanor said and then turned back toward the inside of the house. “Kenny, Mabel’s here for you! I’ll send her in. Kenny’s through there. Has something happened?” she asked, turning back to her neighbour.

  “I’m not sure. I suppose you can all hear about it,” Mabel said, suddenly feeling like it might not be that important after all.

  Inside, having told her story about the figure in the trees, Mabel was about to apologize about making a fuss, when Lane spoke. “You’re not imagining things, at all. An old fellow was seen bathing in the lake a couple of days ago by a young girl who was hiding out in someone’s cottage, and I am certain that someone was using the shed at that old property that the Anscombs used to live in. It can’t be pleasant for him. Rodents had gotten into some food that was left there. But you saw him yesterday, so I wonder why he’s hanging about here? It’s so far from anywhere.”

  “And is he dangerous?” asked Kenny.

  “Surely not,” Eleanor said. “He had a perfect chance to hit Mabel on the head and he didn’t. He could just be a drifter looking for a place to stay dry. Some of those poor fellows who came home from the war and who haven’t adapted very well do wander about.”

  “The young girl said he was old, but anything over twenty-five could seem old to her, especially with a beard. I have to phone the inspector this morning,” Lane was going to say to report on her progress but then realized Mabel was not quite in on her “spying” mission, and so continued, “I can tell him that the man has been spotted again. Perhaps he’ll have an idea.”

  Mabel, back at home and trying to focus her attention on the problem of where to plant the peas this year to avoid getting in the way of the rebuilding of the cellar, whenever the blasted police took the tarp away, underwent a good deal of scrutiny from Gwen and Gladys. While she was impatient, she was reluctant to worry them with her sighting of the person in the wood, particularly now that she knew she h
adn’t been imagining it. Still, considering the dressing down she’d get if she didn’t tell them and one of them later ran into him, she caved in.

  “I thought I saw someone in the woods yesterday, if you must know, up behind the ridge. It wasn’t any of us, either, before you say anything. I thought maybe Kenny would know if there was someone new. Anyway, Lane Winslow was there and said someone had been spotted by some runaway girl down by the lake.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell us?” Gladys asked, amazed. “What if he starts stealing things? Our garage is wide open with all our preserves in it.”

  “I don’t see how my telling you would help,” she said defensively. “Anyway, he might be hungry. We’ll never get through all that lot. What if he’s some poor addled war vet?”

  “GOLLY, I’M SORRY, it’s me again. Mabel’s just been to see me. You know that old guy Erin Landy saw bathing in the lake? Well, there’s been another sighting. Mabel thought she saw someone in the woods up behind their orchard, and, as it happens, I saw that someone had been squatting in a shed at an abandoned property. Anscomb’s property, actually. I was up there looking about. After the business with the locket, I felt the Anscombs might be involved.”

  Darling quelled a knot of anxiety that was beginning to rise. “You’ve been up to the abandoned property? Did you find anything, Detective?”

  “No need to be sarcastic, Inspector. I was just curious. I like to see where things happened. In this case I wanted to see where the Anscombs happened. Oh. I see. It is more important now that we’ve tracked the locket to one of them. I shouldn’t have been tramping around up there.” Lane cursed inwardly to find herself, once again, embarrassed and wrong-footed with the inspector. She could see his newfound trust in her vanishing in an instant.

  “Don’t worry. There’s likely nothing left that relates to this case. I know they haven’t lived there for nearly thirty-five years. Any number of vagrants could have taken up temporary residence there in that time. But what would be useful is if you could make some notes for me. You might as well include your notes about your visit to the house. Did you make any other observations there?”

  Relieved at his apparent unconcern with her bumbling, she said, “It is a cold and miserable place. I bet it was when they lived in it, too. It’s much too small for all those children, very little light. Everyone who remembers them says the mother was sickly and rarely came away from the house with her two younger children. I got the idea that she might have had a sort of melancholy. Robin Harris does remember being up there and roping the younger boy into helping with something or other. And Reginald Mather, true to form, said she must have been quite pretty at one time. I can’t imagine anyone being happy in that house, even if they weren’t suffering from some sort of depressed state. They decamped taking anything they could I expect. The bedsteads were left, some furniture, and ghastly little piles of mouldy clothes here and there. And a pitiful child’s boot.”

  “That could be interesting. Did you bring it away with you?”

  “No. I thought of it, though.”

  “Well, it’ll still be there if we want it. Can you write it all up? You’ve been particularly good at seeing patterns or anomalies. You never know what might be revealed when it’s all laid out on your map. You are doing the map, I suppose?”

  “Indeed I am, with the addition of a very smart timeline down the margin. I feel the weight of the responsibility you have given me, Inspector. You should come have a look at it.”

  “I should like that.” It alarmed Darling how fervently he meant this. “And Miss Winslow, please stay away from that property now. Just because your vagrant hasn’t done anything yet, it doesn’t mean he won’t. As to developments at this end, Ames has had a call from Manitoba, and the father in that family was involved with the death of a child there before he came here, and he seems to have died under mysterious circumstances himself. I’m concerned about that vagrant. We don’t know who the he is, but we’ve put the business of this dead child in the papers, so we don’t know what it’s flushed out of the bushes. I’ll try to come up tomorrow with Amesy and have a look about. Oh. Blast. We can’t. I have to prepare for the hearing of the delinquent girl. That’s coming up in a couple of days. Look, in the meantime, can you try to be careful?”

  “Not to worry, Inspector, I’ll be as careful as can be.”

  Darling hung up the receiver, wishing that he could believe that Miss Winslow intended to heed his warning. She had been very unobliging about this sort of thing in the past.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE LATE AFTERNOON USHERED IN a drop in temperature, and Lane, working hard on her notes, felt its effects at the same moment that she realized the sun was already low in the sky and she had not yet lit her stove. With an imprecation, she pulled on her wool jacket and went out to the woodshed with her basket. Here she discovered she had gotten behind on her wood splitting, and she rolled up her sleeves. As she took up her axe, she remembered that just up the road there was a whole shed full of wood that no one at all was using, and though most was, like hers, not split, there was a small pile ready to use. It was only when she was steering the car up past the Bertollis’ house toward the old Anscomb place that she admitted to herself that the wood would probably be damp and unusable, and what was really going on was a renewed curiosity to see the place and perhaps bring out the boot. There would, she calculated, be at least another hour of light.

  With the engine of the car off, she sat in the total silence and gazed at the house from the road. She tried again, more concretely this time, to imagine the house alive with the Anscomb family. In the spring, with evening coming on. The house was higher than hers, closer to the looming mountain and forest that backed King’s Cove. The mountain already sank the house in shadow, causing Lane to shiver. The mother would be in the kitchen preparing food, her daughter Isabel helping, or perhaps looking after the younger children. There would be smoke from the chimney. The father and the older boy would be outside splitting wood or washing. Where would they wash? She hadn’t seen any sort of bathing facility in the house, she realized. Would they use the metal washtub in the shed? The misery of the settler’s life filled her with a fearful sadness.

  We usually think of idyllic life in the country, Lane thought, always pictured in the late summer, during the day. Apples beaming and blushing in rich orchards, gardens arrayed in sunny rows. Plump, pink-faced children smiling as they help with the harvest. We don’t imagine it on a cold spring evening after a long winter of scarcity: unsanitary conditions, the ever-present danger of fire from kerosene, and the endless hardship of every little act—constant drudgery for already exhausted and unhappy people.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake,” she chided herself out loud. People were used to it then. It was all they knew. Everyone outside a city lived like that. But she could not shake the feeling that this was a house with an unrelieved burden of sadness about it.

  Even knowing that after nearly thirty-five years there would be nothing left to tell the story of the child and the locket, Lane moved more deliberately through the house, imagining more completely where people slept, what they were tasked with. All the children must have slept in one of the small rooms and the parents in the other. Perhaps the two smaller children, or only the baby, slept with the parents. The stove in the kitchen would have been kept going, perhaps ashes banked for the night. A large kettle on the hob for hot water. Laundry hanging over the stove. She looked up. She could see hooks in the ceiling for pulleys, but the wooden laundry rack was gone. In the sitting room she tried to imagine a chesterfield and some chairs, some books, but then realized that in a house this small, the room might have been used as a sleeping room as well. When she was a child she had visited local farmers with the cook, and in the winter all the beds were pulled into the kitchen. It was the only place warm enough in those bitter, northern winters.

  Outside again, she bypassed the woodshed, moved toward the other dilapidated shed, and pulled the
latch up. The door swung open, and in the silent darkness she heard a faint, unnerving scurry. She moved to the metal washbasin. Here clothes and people would be washed. She touched the rim and could feel the disintegration of rust under her fingers. She wished she had brought her flashlight, as the darkness inside this outbuilding made any further exploration impossible. She would come back in the morning.

  Taking her wood basket from the back seat of the car, she returned to the woodshed and, trying to still a feeling of guilt, she began to pile the split wood into the basket. It was stealing, she saw that, but not from anybody, really, she told her conscience. When her basket was full she stretched and was about to leave when she saw the splitting block. She looked around the small space. You couldn’t swing an axe in here, she thought. Her own block was outside, ready for use. She imagined the family leaving, packing everything into the wagon to be pulled down the hill to the steamer, horses waiting, trying to reach tufts of grass, while the family went in and out of the house with mattresses, boxes, bags of clothes.

  She moved the block a few inches forward and immediately the pile of logs began to shift, and some rolled free as if making a break for it after all the years of being held. She hastily pushed the block back into place, but the balance was disturbed and more logs rolled down. Jumping back toward the door to avoid being hit, she chuckled nervously at what Darling would say if he could see her, and waited till the action subsided. She was about to push some logs back away from the door so she could close it, when she noticed something crushed against the wall. It was almost unrecognizable at first. Hoping it was not a desiccated animal, she wrinkled her nose and pulled it out into the dim light. The mate, she was sure of it, to the boot inside the house. The logs that had been on top of it had crushed it, but it was clearly the same size as the other one. How old would a child who wore this boot be? Five? She felt an overwhelming desire to reunite it with its mate, a kind of mute testament to the last moments in the house of the vanished family.