Burden of Memory

by Vicki Delany

  “Not your fault, young man,” Charles said. “No one wants to have to go running to you if they want to get a fire going.”

  “A stack of loose papers was placed on top of one of those old boxes you keep up there, with a piece of fire starter underneath. And then lit.”

  The family gasped.

  “Fortunately, packed paper burns badly, very badly. A smoldering toilet roll will make a nice cooker, but it needs attention. No air circulation, you see. Fire would have gone out as soon as the loose papers were all burned up. Lots of smoke, a bad smell and that’s all. Excepting that one of the papers must have blown off the stack. I suspect it landed by the window; some old draperies stored there are pretty well destroyed. And once they caught you had enough heat to start on the walls and reach the roof.”

  “Surely, you can’t be serious, Mr. —” Alison said. She pushed her chair back and paced the room. Her normally faultless blond hair was flattened down one side, presumably the side she slept on, and sticking up in all directions at the back, where she had earlier been scratching at her scalp with vigor. Her tailored shirt was wrinkled and awkwardly stuffed into cream wool slacks, and the belt around her thin waist had failed to thread through several of the loops at the back of the pants. Her nail polish was chipped. “Someone left an electric heater burning and it over heated, that’s all there is to it.”

  “I didn’t leave the heater on. Why do people keep saying that?” In contrast to Alison, Phoebe was back to her normal self. When upstairs with Moira she had taken the opportunity to reapply her Count Dracula makeup, drench her hair in lacquer, and slip on an outfit of unadulterated black. But under the shock of Weiss’ revelations her complexion had turned paler still.

  “I believe you, Miss,” Weiss said. “’Cause the heater is badly scorched, for sure, but it wasn’t the center of the blaze by any means. In fact, it isn’t even plugged in.”

  Phoebe tossed a triumphant smile around the table.

  “All right, something else then,” Elliot said. “Have you been smoking, Phoebe?”

  “No, I have not been smoking.” The girl rose to her feet. “And don’t you dare accuse me. I didn’t start it.” She stared at Elliot until her uncle looked away.

  It seemed to Elaine that all the hows didn’t matter one whit. It was the whys that they should be concerned about. She had questions of her own to ask, but hesitated, unsure if it would be wiser to remain unobtrusive. This wasn’t her family, or her home.

  The moment to speak passed as Weiss dug appreciatively into his sandwich. They pretended not to notice as droplets of olive oil dripped down his numerous chins.

  In retrospect, Elaine’s silence was a mistake of enormous proportions. She would spend many sleepless nights wondering if a life could have been saved if she had spoken up.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Lunch over, the family scattered. Moira pronounced herself ready for a nap. It was obvious to all that she was about to drop on the spot, and Alison and Phoebe hustled her upstairs. Megan announced with some degree of drama that she was quite exhausted and also in need of sleep. Elliot said that he would be in the library watching the game. Alan went to see to the dogs while Charles escorted Mr. Weiss back to his truck.

  Elaine wanted only to get away for a while. This would be a good time to get her car out of hibernation. She’d driven into Bracebridge once, to buy tapes for the recorder, but otherwise hadn’t taken out the car for the nearly three weeks that she’d been here.

  She followed Charles and Weiss to the back door. Pulling on her hiking boots and taking her coat down from the hook by the door, she could hear them outside, talking in low voices.

  So much for keeping everyone informed.

  Dave and Amber were crossing the yard. They walked close together, almost touching, but pulled apart as soon as they saw that they were being watched. Amber’s pretty face was flushed, making her look all of about twelve years old, and Dave had an expression that would be a perfect match to that of a cat who had swallowed a whole bottle of cream.

  “I suggest you have a talk with that young man over there.” Charles pointed directly at Dave. “He’s been hanging around here a good deal more than one would expect. He and his friends. Ask them where they were last night.”

  Dave smiled; to Elaine it looked like the smile of a crocodile. His body was appeared relaxed, but his hands were clenched into fists at his side. “If you have something to say to me, sir, I’d prefer if you’d say it to my face.”

  Amber reached for Dave’s arm. He shrugged her off.

  “What’s this about?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Surely, you can’t think that Dave had anything to do with what happened last night!”

  Weiss appeared to be a country hick, fat and slow on the uptake, but he knew his job, and his ears pricked to attention. “Do you know something about the fire here last night?” he asked Dave.

  “No, I don’t. Sorry. If you’ll excuse us, Amber has offered me some lunch.”

  “You started that fire, you ignorant son-of-a-bitch!” Charles roared and stumbled down the steps, scarcely able to stand straight in his rage. “You could have killed us all.” He grabbed Dave by the front of his T-shirt and shook the boy like an aging fox with a rabbit in his jaws.

  Lizzie ran out of the house to stand on the steps behind Elaine. Alan tore around the corner of the cottage, the dogs at his heels. Hamlet and Ophelia took one look at the scene and, not knowing who was the invader, barked at everyone.

  “No,” Elaine screamed at the look of red rage that crossed behind Dave’s small black eyes. If there hadn’t been an audience, she was sure that Dave would have struck out. However, rather than deliver the strong punch that the look seemed to be forecasting, he simply raised both his hands, palms out, and pushed Charles away with about as much force as swatting at a mosquito. The old man staggered backwards, tripped over a stone, and fell heavily.

  Even over the racket of the dogs, the yelling of the men, the frightened gasps of the onlookers, Elaine could hear the sickening sound of a brittle, osteoporosis-riddled bone cracking as Charles’ arm collapsed under his inconsiderable weight.

  He made not a sound, but the color drained out of his face like water being emptied from a bathtub. Weiss, Elaine, Lizzie, and Alan rushed to help the old man up. Amber lifted one hand to her mouth and chewed on her knuckles. Dave grinned, looking as if he had survived a round with a world-class prizefighter instead of pushing an octogenarian to the ground.

  “We’d better get you to the hospital, Mr. Stoughton,” Alan said.

  Charles gasped for breath. “Okay.” Some of the color returned to his face, not much, but enough to bring it back to a semblance of life. “But first, I insist that you arrest that man. You saw him attack me, Weiss. You saw it all. You have powers of arrest, don’t you? Use them. Imagine, attacking an old man. That punk attacked me.”

  “What,” Dave yelled. “You started it. I barely touched you. Isn’t that right, Amber?”

  Amber looked from her great-uncle to Dave and burst into tears.

  “An old man,” Alan shouted, “you have to fight an old man. I’d like to see you try it on me.”

  Dave assumed a fighter’s stance, dancing on his toes, his fists up. “I’m ready. Come on then.”

  Now Ophelia and Hamlet had a target. They followed Alan’s lead, pulled back their teeth and growled deep in their throats as they moved on lowered haunches.

  “Only kidding,” Dave shouted, folding his hands across his chest and opening his fingers in submission. “I barely touched the old man. It was an accident. I’m a guest of Amber. Tell them, Amber.”

  “Arrest him,” Charles repeated. He leaned against Elaine. He was tall, but bent with old age and new pain, he matched Elaine’s height. She slipped her arm tightly around his body. There was no layer of fat to cushion the old bones.

  Weiss shuffled his feet. “I’m afraid, Mr. Stoughton, that what I saw was an unfortunate accident.”

 
Dave might try to appear all friendly and innocent, Elaine thought, but a slow fire burned deep inside him and she didn’t trust him one inch.

  “I’ll take Mr. Stoughton to the hospital,” she said.

  “I couldn’t impose,” Charles whispered, the pain superseding his anger. “Alan will take me.”

  “Look.” She forced a smile and held up one hand, in which she still clutched her car keys. “I was going for a drive anyway. No imposition.”

  “I’ll help you.” Lizzie plucked the keys from Elaine’s hand and led the way up the hill to the cars. “I’ll tell Alison and Elliot what’s happened and I’m sure they’ll follow you.”

  Now that the dogs actually had someone in their sights, Alan had his hands full, dragging them away from their intended prey.

  Fortunately it was Charles’ arm that was broken, not a leg, otherwise he never would have managed to squeeze into Elaine’s BMW. His face had again turned a ghastly white and his lips contorted with pain as he settled into the leather seat. He reached out the hand of his good left arm to stop Elaine as she put the key into the ignition. “Call Weiss over.”

  She obeyed and Weiss lowered his bulk as much as he was able to squat beside the car window.

  “I want you back here tonight, after I get home from the hospital. We still have business to discuss. I want that scum and his no-good friends off my property, today!”

  “I don’t….”

  “They started that fire, and I expect you to prove it.” With a sigh that spoke volumes, Charles collapsed back against the soft brown leather of the seat and closed his eyes.

  Elaine turned the key, remembering as she did so that the car hadn’t been on the road for a week or more. The surface was covered in a fine miasma of dust, but the engine caught the first time and roared into life, glad to be back to work. She soaked the windows with anti-freeze and switched on the wipers to scrape them clean.

  She let the engine go and roared down the country lanes at a speed that would have had the late Augustus screaming for mercy. Feeling a bit guilty at enjoying the moment, she peeked out of the corner of her eye at her passenger. Charles’ eyes were closed and he was a horrid color but his breathing remained steady. Perhaps she would drop him at the entrance to Emergency and continue on her way. Leaving the Madisons and all their hang-ups to themselves.

  But she thought of Moira: her wonderful letters and her dominating family and her fierce determination to be her own woman. And a story she, Elaine, wanted—now needed—to tell.

  The hospital wasn’t busy, and they attended to Charles immediately. While Elaine waited, she flicked through piles of ancient copies of Reader’s Digests and National Geographics. Almost as good as traveling through a time machine. She didn’t have to read for long before a nurse clutching a packet of x-rays escorted Charles back to the waiting room. At that moment, Alison and Brad burst through the swinging door.

  “For heaven’s sake,” Alison exclaimed. She was as disheveled as she had been at lunch. Worse because she had rubbed at her face, leaving black mascara smudged into dark bruises under her eyes.

  “You okay, Uncle Charles?” asked Brad.

  “Just a fall, young man, can’t get this old chap down yet,” Charles chucked with bonhomie so false Elaine expected the hovering nurse to boo. “I stood up to Hitler, I can stand up to some young punk, eh?”

  “Uh, right.” Brad obviously couldn’t quite see what Hitler had to do with all this.

  “God, this is all getting too much,” Alison said. “A nice, pleasant family Thanksgiving this has turned out to be.”

  “I need to take Mr. Stoughton through to see the doctor now,” the nurse said. “Are you the family?”

  “We are,” Alison said, lifting her chin proudly.

  “Then you can come with me.”

  “Brad, go and get your grandma, then meet us back here. We had a call from the hospital as we were leaving,” Alison explained to Charles and Elaine. “Mom is ready to come home, so we thought that we could pick you both up at the same time. Isn’t that nice?” Her expression indicated that it was anything but. “We came in two cars, so you can leave, Elaine. The family will manage from here.”

  Properly dismissed, and not sorry about it, Elaine abandoned her copy of National Geographic (January 1980: a cover photograph of Jupiter, taken by Voyager, but looking much more like a Georges Seurat pointillist painting) and returned to her car.

  She needed a short walk to clear her head, full as it was of half formed ideas and images, all swirling around, caught in a hurricane, everything moving but nothing settling. Weiss seemed to know his job. If he said the fire had been started deliberately, then arson it surely was. The question then: who would have reason to burn down the storage building? And potentially the cottage as well. Left unattended for a few more minutes the fire might easily have made the jump from one building to the other. To where the family were sound asleep in their beds. Charles suspected Dave and his friends camping out on the island. Dave, she could happily imagine being responsible, but he appeared to have no reason. As for Rachel and Kyle and the others, the idea was preposterous. They cared for Moira, and no one was more vulnerable in a house fire than the elderly and infirm.

  There was no sign that anyone had broken into the old guesthouse, or so Alan had reported. But that didn’t mean much—Alan locked the building every night, but the keys were kept on a hook in the kitchen, available to anyone in the house.

  Not set intentionally perhaps? Phoebe had not been smoking up in the loft; of that Elaine was certain. She’d never seen the black-clad, black-makeup drenched girl smoke. But there was no need for anyone else to go up there after she and Phoebe had finished for the day.

  Or maybe there was?

  Who knew what reasons people had in a family as complex as the Madisons.

  The hospital was close to the center of the small resort town of Bracebridge. She wandered through the streets without noticing her surroundings. A weekday in autumn, the tourists were few on the ground, and most locals were still resting up from the delights of their own Thanksgiving repast.

  She stopped at a convenience store to stock up on bags of chips and chocolate bars. Lizzie’s cooking was nothing short of amazing but Elaine felt herself to be in desperate need of a jolt of something perfectly junky and overloaded with fat and sugar.

  When she got back to her car, several of the local teenagers were hanging about, all baggy pants, enormous running shoes and flannel shirts, sparse beards and numerous, imaginative piercings. They leaned on the hood, smoking cigarettes, and stared openly at Elaine as she pulled her keys out of her jacket pocket.

  “Good day, gentlemen. If you’ll step aside, I can be on my way.” She grinned. “You like my car, eh?”

  “Yea, real nice.” One of the boys, cigarette drooping out of the corner of his mouth, gaped in unadulterated envy. On cue, they stepped back to allow Elaine to unlock the door and slip smoothly behind the wheel. The engine started with the most delicate of touches to the ignition and purred like a kitten being scratched under its chin. Waving gaily to her circle of admirers she pulled out into the non-existent traffic.

  Deciding not to run away after all, Elaine headed back to the cottage. The road wound between patches of open lakes, large and small, and rushing rivers. Flashes of sun-reflecting blue flashed through the green and brown of the woods.

  When she got back, Elliot told her that Moira would be indisposed for the rest of the day. Gratefully Elaine informed Lizzie that she would not be down for dinner and crawled upstairs to her welcome bed. It had been one really long day.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “Killed who?” Moira asked.

  “Amy Murphy. I killed her.”

  “Moira, it’s time to go.” A group of her fellow sisters stood on the top of the cliffs that towered over the stretch of rocky beach and the sea beyond. Hard to know how long they had been calling, waving, and generally making a fuss trying to catch her attention.

&n
bsp; Jean started down the steps towards them. Moira pushed Ralph out of her lap and jumped to her feet. “I’ll come later,” she shouted, waving for them to leave.

  Jean hesitated. She yelled something unintelligible.

  “Ralph will see me home. I’ll be all right,” Moira called, trying to smile.

  For God’s sake go away.

  Jean shrugged and made her way back up the stairs.

  Moira dragged Ralph to his feet. “That’s not funny.”

  “I killed her, M. I killed her.”

  Tumbling memories. A pretty, cheerful maid. Wild red curls barely contained under a stiff cap, belt pulled in a bit too tight, dancing freckles and a wide smile. Mother complaining that she was “most unhappy with Amy. The girl has airs above her station.”

  Summer 1939. The last good summer. A sleepless Moira looking for a book, finding instead—Ralph, hair tussled and face scratched, shirt hanging out of his pants, creeping up the staircase without turning on any lights. A sly wink and a finger to the lips as he passed. In those days the upper servants had rooms on the third floor and the lower servants, like Amy Murphy, slept in separate cabins on the grounds.

  “I killed her, M. She came to me one night. The night after Paul splashed his brains all over me. And she told me that it’s my turn to die. She said I’m a coward, and I deserve to die. Because she died.”

  “Ralph. Listen to me. You had a dream. One of Mother’s maids isn’t going to visit you in Italy in the middle of the night to make threats. It was a dream. That’s all.”

  “Not a dream. Not. She was there.” He gripped her arms and shook her with sufficient force that her teeth rattled. When she undressed for the night Moira would see a line of finger-size bruises marching across her upper arms, in proper military formation.

  “Stop it, Ralph. Listen to me. They’re doing some wonderful work in the psychiatric units these days.”

  “I’m not crazy, Moira. I killed her.”