“She owned it for how long?”
“Well, I suppose technically the cottage was my father’s. He died in 1998, so my mother had it alone for ten years. But it was built by my grandfather—my father’s father—in the 1920s.”
“When did your grandfather die?”
“Not long after I was born—in 1950, I believe. I was born in ’49.” Lydia frowns slightly. Her heart, thrashing in her chest, eases a little. Interest in the cottage’s ownership is not what she’s expected. “May I ask—”
“We had a big storm here at Thanksgiving. There was a lot of destruction in the area. Your cottage—your former cottage—was destroyed—”
“Oh, no.”
“—and the new owner killed.”
“Good god.” She knows this, but hearing it voiced shocks her. “How—”
“A tree took the cottage down. Mr. … Black was inside at the time. There was also a fire.”
“A fire? Oh, my god. How awful. His poor family …” And now she anticipates a new line of questioning. She can feel her pulse racing. “But I don’t see how I can …?”
“Ma’am, the storm turned up some human remains on your former property.”
“Oh?”
“The pathologist has established that the bones belong to that of a male between seventeen and twenty-one years of age.”
Lydia wants to faint, to put her head in her hands and weep. The only saving grace is that Sgt. Sinclair cannot see her, cannot read the distress in her face. Only the timbre of her voice can hint of deceit. She strains to keep the breath in her lungs from ratcheting and says the first thing that comes to her mind:
“How odd. Could it be an Indian burial ground?”
“No, ma’am.” The measured tone is suddenly censorious. “There is no evidence this is a First Nations burial site.”
“I see. Of course.”
“According to the pathology report, the body has lain in the ground for more than sixty years, but less than eighty.”
“What?” The mathematics are wrong, simply wrong. Can forensics be this imprecise, this off the mark, this inept?
Sergeant Sinclair repeats her last comment, adding, “This puts the burial within the time-frame of your family’s ownership.”
“But … I’m not yet sixty myself, Sergeant. I wasn’t alive at the time. I don’t know how I can help you.” She wants to laugh. This is insane. What of the remnants of the HBC blanket? But she can’t ask those questions. Doesn’t dare ask. “If you’re thinking this has something to do with my family, I don’t know how.”
“Ma’am, we’re treating this as an unsolved murder.”
“An unsolved—”
“Did any member of your family possess a firearm?”
“A firearm?” Lydia repeats dully. The word confuses her. She thinks of Americans and their mania for weaponry. Her family—her birth family—is Canadian. “No.”
“The barrel and receiver of a shotgun were found among the remains of the cottage fire.”
“Oh …well, yes, there was a old shotgun at Eadon Lodge,” Lydia begins, wonderingly, “hanging on one of the walls. It was an … ornament. I never saw it taken down in my life.” A lie. Alan Rayner racing across the lawn in the fading light flits through her mind. “It was my grandfather’s. I think he and my father would sometimes go duck hunting nearby in the Netley marshes before the war. How does this—”
“Shot was found near the remains.”
“Shot?”
“Gunshot.”
Lydia is stunned to silence. Had shot remained in Paul’s body? Is this the damning evidence? But Alan only grazed Paul. Briony ministered to his shoulder with mercurochrome and a bandage. There can’t have been shot left in Paul’s arm. Could there have been? Wouldn’t he have been in too much pain to … Lydia banishes her last image of the living Paul. She thinks: how serious the police are being about this. Shot pellets are small, she knows that. They must have sieved the soil.
“Ms Eadon?”
“Yes, sorry. I … I don’t know what I can tell you. Sixty years ago, you say? Or seventy or eighty?”
“I realize this is difficult for you. Can you tell me if you know stories of … conflict in your family or among your family and their friends?”
Lydia looks wildly about her office as if the Countervail titles and the reference books and the myriad magazines held the secret. “I don’t know. I have no idea. I know so little. Our family was small, at least on my father’s side. There was only my father and his father. My grandmother died in childbirth.”
“I see.”
“Not giving birth to my father, I should add. My father had a younger brother. He was … mentally challenged and died young. My grandmother’s sister came from Ontario to take care of the boys and was their surrogate mother for a number of years, but I’m not sure what became of her. Long gone, in any case.”
Lydia suddenly remembers Helen’s story of her grandfather and his sister-in-law, Aunt May, as she was called, arguing at Bibs and Marion’s wedding. “I have a feeling,” she adds, “that she and my grandfather didn’t get along. But I don’t think that’s much help to you and that’s about all I can think of. My father spoke little of his family. He was of that generation, you know, the generation that went through the Depression and the war. They were stoics.”
“Family friends?”
“Who would come to the cottage in those days? I have no idea. The cottage was really used so little, mostly a few weeks in August each year, some weekends. My father would go down from time to time just to cut the lawn. He was a surgeon, always busy, took few holidays.”
“And you?”
“Me? When I sold the property in the summer it was the first time I had been back in nearly forty years.”
“I see. Well, thank you, you’ve been very—”
“Sergeant,” Lydia interrupts, contrives to make her voice light, “out of curiosity, would you know what happens to the property now?”
“No.”
“Who Mr. Black’s heirs might be …?
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“It’s just that he seemed to sort of fall in love with the cottage. It’s all very sad. I suppose with winter setting in up there, little will be done with the property.”
“Not likely, no. It’s starting to snow here now, actually. Snow on Halloween. You’re lucky to live in California.”
“Yes, I suppose I am.” Lydia glances at the sunny street outside her window, imagining white blanketing the black remains of the cottage. Only one thing could take her back to Manitoba and that she pushes from her mind.
“Anyway, Ms Eadon—”
“Just one more question, if you don’t mind.” Lydia hesitates. Will she tempt the sergeant to suspicion? She frames it this way: “I can’t help wondering … I mean, all those summers of my childhood not knowing, I suppose, that I was treading on someone’s grave. Where was it exactly? It would be nice to know.”
“I can answer that.” Lydia listens to another rustle of paper. “The remains were found, let’s see … in the southeast part of the property. Does that help?”
Lydia lies: “Yes. Yes, it does.”
30
“Fuck.”
“What happened?”
“I cut myself.”
Lydia sucks in her breath sharply. “Are you all right? Can I get you a bandage?”
“No. It’s no biggie.” Ray turns, his left index finger stuffed in his mouth.
Ray is at the kitchen counter making their ritual pre-dinner martinis—not with olives, but with a twist. The lemon tree in their back garden produces small orangey-yellow fruit, slightly sweet and intensely aromatic.
“The vegetable peeler?”
Ray nods, pulls his finger out to speak. “I’ve never done that before. With a peeler,
I mean.”
Lydia feels sudden damp film her skin. Shock, she recognizes—and that is shocking. Why? And the answer comes when the words—Briony’s, on a Halloween long ago, slip from her lips. “Run your finger under the cold water.”
“Are you all right?” Ray says, a frown forming along his lips, before turning to the taps. “Cuntella being a bitch?”
“Oh … the usual. She’s been obsessing about a new company logo.”
“And …?”
“Looks like clip art.”
“What?”
“Clip art!” Lydia raises her voice above the water’s hammering. She gazes at Ray’s back in its Hawaiian print. In truth, she’s feeling a little faint—nauseated, in fact, though she ate little lunch.
“You know,” Ray turns back to her. “Maybe I’d better have a bandage … or it’ll be pink martinis for you and me, baby.”
She can feel Ray’s eyes on her as she fetches the bandage from the junk drawer too neatly organized to warrant the name. She begins to unpeel its paper sheath.
“Are you all right?” he asks again.
“Oh … long day, long week.” She wraps the bandage around her husband’s upright finger. “You did get stuff for Halloween, yes?”
Ray grunts in assent. “Say, what about Dudley Do-Right? … or Dorothy Do-Right, I guess it was.”
“Who?
“The call this morning. From Canada.” He cocks an eyebrow and drops his voice for a stentorian announcement: “From the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.” He finds the idea of Canada faintly comical. He subscribes to all the clichés: beavers, toboggans, and maple syrup. He draws them on cards. “Are you helping them get their man? They always get their man, you know.”
“No.” Lydia laughs lightly and turns to deposit the bandage wrapping in the trash, glancing at the unsettling Edward Gorey wall calendar over the towel rack. She’s rehearsed something for Ray. “Eadon Lodge, it seems, is no more. There was a big storm in Gimli earlier in the month. A tree fell on it and that was that.”
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. Are you … I mean, you weren’t really attached to the place, were you?”
“God no.” God no.
“Its sale made all the difference to affording this place. Still … kind of too bad.” Ray turns back to the cutting board and the lemon. “And the Mounties phoned to tell you this? Amazing. I mean, that cabin wasn’t even yours anymore.”
“I guess they thought it was a courtesy.”
“Wow.” Ray also subscribes to the notion that Canadians are unusually polite and courteous. “I can’t imagine our cops doing something like that. Poor guy that bought the place. Hope he had it insured.” He hands her the stemmed glass, the lemon peel curled inside the bowl reminding Lydia—suddenly, for no reason—of a tiny fetus. “Kanpai! Here’s to the week that was.”
Lydia sets her glass on the counter next to a box of Misaki’s crayons. She’s going to be sick.
Ray teaches a class in freehand drawing Saturday mornings at Fort Mason. He leaves Lydia lying in bed. He brought her breakfast, still concerned over last evening’s episode of sickness. Something she ate, she said. A shrimp salad at lunch, must have been off. A fiction, Ray believes. Accumulated stress—her mother’s death, packing up a house and an old life, purchasing this house, money worries, work worries—I mean, bang! Little wonder Lyds threw it all up—though she’s never done that before.
Lydia doesn’t much like breakfast in bed. Crumbs, the chance of slopped coffee, spilled juice. But she suffers it gladly on her birthday and at Mother’s Day because it gives Ray pleasure. She sets the tray aside, grimaces at the barely touched coddled egg, now cooling and jelling, hardening into repulsiveness. She has no appetite. She would like to be alone, but she isn’t, and that’s all right in this instance. Misaki has crawled into bed beside her, fallen asleep over a book, the warmth of her little body and the gentle susurration of her breathing a welcome comfort. Lydia stares out the window at the fickle San Francisco sky, clear and blue yesterday, overcast today. Her thoughts unspool.
Her champion is dead. Young Jonathan Black was to protect and preserve the cottage, its property and chattels from here to her own dying breath. She’d felt assured by his enthusiasm, by his declaration that he would never, ever, in a thousand years, build one of those vulgar second homes. She remembers the day later in August, after the paperwork was complete, meeting Dorian for the last time in Winnipeg Beach, on the set of Morningstar Cove, where they were shooting a scene inside a restaurant, the street strewn with cables, the set sealed from view by a wall of cameras and technicians.
“Is it done?” he murmured, after she’d picked her way past gaffers and gofers and, led by a PA alerted to her coming, found him hunched over a video monitor wedged among plant pots and tables with, she presumed, members of the production team.
“Yes. Well … at least postponed.”
“That’ll have to do, I guess.” Dorian ushered her away to an unpeopled corner and whispered. “Even with that guy buying it, I would still liked to have cleared that—”
“You say that now, Dorian. But could you? Could you really have borne the horror of it? The remains?”
“Shhh.”
“And the chance of your being—”
“Our being.”
“—caught in the act was just too fraught. Clearing bush, yes. Excavating a hole, no.”
She remembers Dorian, in the terrible dad jeans of his costume, pushing a hand through his abundance of white hair, looking suddenly old and careworn, and feeling her heart begin to break.
“Did you get your money back on the chainsaw?” She couldn’t think what else to say. This was a farewell—the sort they should have had in their youth, at an airport or a train station, each going on to glory, speaking fine words and good cheer. Who knew when they would meet again? She could see the mist in his eyes matching her own.
“I haven’t returned it yet.” He put his arms around her and said into her ear, “Do you really trust that kid not to flip the cottage?”
“Is there any going back?”
He released her, regarded her with sorrow. “Is there ever any going back?”
Did Jonathan Black have a will? Did he have heirs? Lydia wonders this as Misaki stirs next to her. He was separated—not divorced—from his wife, no kids, the real estate agent had told her. If he died intestate, wouldn’t his wife inherit … everything? something? despite the breakdown in their marriage? Lydia considers retrieving her laptop to look at Black’s obituary in the online Winnipeg Free Press to pluck out the wife’s name, but is there any point? Eadon Lodge is no longer hers to bargain over. She thinks of phoning Briony, who might know something about Eadon Lodge’s fate. But if Briony knew something, surely she would have phoned her already, yes? Lydia decides not to phone her. Arousing Briony’s curiosity might not be a good thing.
Dorian. She will phone Dorian, though. Another one apparently oblivious to this new tilt in the earth’s axis.
But what about the bones? These bones, for heaven’s sake, found in the southeast of the property, not the northwest. Is it possible the sergeant had the map, the paperwork, the drawing, the computer image, whatever, of the property upside down, northwest becoming southeast? That must be it, and yet Lydia refuses to subscribe to the notion that women are somehow direction-challenged. Nor did the sergeant sound like some bored functionary.
Can, then, buried remains shift over time? Not that distance. Impossible.
Can the pathologist be so off the mark? The age of the remains between sixty and eighty years? Sixty and eighty?
And there is the shot. The fire-scarred remains of a shotgun.
A death, by shotgun, sometime between—what?—1928 and 1948.
Lydia hears Erin stir in the bedroom across the hall. Her eyes rove her own bedroom, glancing over the potted yucca cane grown now to six
feet, the Victorian wicker chair she’d had restored when she lived with Helen all those years ago, the white cork board artfully displaying fifty sets of earrings she no longer wears but loves anyway, the tidy vanity table with two framed photographs, the Beljik rug she bought at Palayan’s with Ray when they first moved in together. All so at peace. And now this intrusion.
That there is a body, another buried body (it must be another) at Eadon Lodge seems preposterous, a punchline of a feeble joke, a cruel taunt from some prankster god.
A violent death, an unmarked grave, yet a generation—at least—earlier. What could have happened?
It is spring. It is evening. The property is isolated. There is a young man with … someone. One of them has a shotgun, a different shotgun than the one at Eadon Lodge. There is an argument, a gun is raised …
It is summer. It is night. The property is isolated. A drifter tries to break into a cottage that looks unoccupied. Her grandfather is slumbering. He wakes, snatches the gun off the wall …
It is fall. It is morning. The property is isolated. Some gang of thugs arrives with the squealer who betrayed them …
What else can it be? The property is no potter’s field, no native burial ground. Lydia plucks unthinkingly at the edge of the bedspread, her eyes once again roving the room, though this time registering little. What can it be? Her attention falls for a moment on the photographs on the vanity; their silver frames somehow catch a valiant ray of November sun slipped past the cloud barricade. The oldest: her wedding day, she and Ray, at City Hall, she in a tailored suit, the wide shoulders now regrettable. The newest, from her parents’ bedroom: Bibs and Marion, their wedding day, smiling in the open door of a Buick, Bibs in a dark suit spattered with confetti, Marion clutching the marriage licence. Unbidden, an old anecdote spins to the surface of thought: Helen’s, about Bibs and Marion’s wedding reception, some unpleasantness between her grandfather and his sister-in-law, May, the woman who raised Bibs and Lits, then vanished from their lives. Uncle Lits, who died so young, an absence at the wedding, a presence only in a photograph. In the 1930s, you could die of influenza, and Lits probably wasn’t a strong boy. She recalls seeking his grave in that churchyard in Narborough in the late ’80s, failing, and Bibs, so furious at her attempt, though perhaps in his incipient dementia he was merely confused.
Paul Is Dead Page 24
