Burden of Memory

by Vicki Delany

  A definite chill hung in the air. The wind whipped up dead leaves and stirred thin branches. Winter on its way.

  Before leaving, she’d stopped in the kitchen for a glass of orange juice and idly read a note left under a fridge magnet for Lizzie from Charles. He and Megan would be leaving after breakfast. He wanted to see his doctor in Toronto about the broken arm, he explained. They’d take Maeve home with them.

  The note marked a clear victory for Moira, in the battle if not necessarily the war. Elaine would also be glad to see the household fall back into its routine. They were simply not getting the amount of work done that she had hoped. Phoebe was a great help, and she fairly chewed through the boxes of letters, sorting out the minutia, freeing Elaine to concentrate on the more important ones. But Moira was constantly distracted, bad tempered, and on edge.

  And Elaine was not convinced that someone wasn’t up to mischief. Wrong word. A fire in an aged, wooden building situated right next to a home occupied by several elderly individuals was by no stretch of the imagination to be considered mischief. She didn’t believe that either Lizzie or Alan bore a grudge against Moira or the family. Ruth, however, had a chip on her shoulder the size and weight of a hunk of the Canadian Shield. She did seem to be genuinely fond of Moira, but there was no telling what lay under people’s carefully laid facades. Since their talk, when Ruth had cut her hand on the mug, she had been marginally warmer towards Elaine. But appearances, as always, could be deceiving. Who knew where Ruth’s misplaced jealousy might lead?

  And that left the islanders, Moira’s two sisters, Charles, Amber, and Phoebe. Alison, Elliot, and Brad were here at the time of the fire, but they had left before the incident with Moira’s pillow.

  Phoebe Elaine needed, so she was irrationally taken out of contention for the role of villain. With the imminent departure of the islanders, Amber would soon make her farewells also.

  It was dimly possible that the trouble wasn’t someone associated with the family at all. Elaine focused her eyes and looked at the forest around her for clues. She approached the Madisons’ driveway; if someone were hiding out in the woods, it should be obvious.

  She stopped running and snorted at herself. What pretensions of grandeur. It might be obvious to Sherlock Holmes, and even apparent to a Courier du Bois, but Elaine Benson wouldn’t recognize a misstep in the woods if it rose up and bit her. It was theoretically possible that she would be suspicious of a signpost announcing Terrorist Camp Here, but not much less than that.

  She jogged back down the driveway and rounded the cottage to walk up the steps to the deck. Yesterday’s impromptu picnic had long since been cleared away, and the deck once again stood bare. Abandoned for the winter. She hoped that she would get the opportunity to see this magnificent old cottage in the hot summer weather it had been built for. Her work should be done by then, but maybe Moira would invite her back for a weekend. Mentally, she slapped herself across the face for dreaming. No point in speculating where she would be nine long months from now.

  Stopping at the top of the stairs, Elaine settled into her regular routine of stretches and cool down. The dogs barked. Nothing in the least unusual about that. But this was a frenzied pitch unlike the tones she’d heard from them before. Granted she’d only been here a couple of weeks, and granted she disliked those dogs with a passion, but some primitive instinct twitched.

  Elaine looked up.

  In the woods and along the road the air had been clear, full of the fresh, new light of the rising sun, but down here a soft morning haze drifted in off the water. Elaine stepped off the deck, her nerves standing to attention.

  Moira, Moira, the words echoed inside her head, around and around.

  She glanced down the flagstone path, to the point where it ended and the dark, forbidden woods closed in. The rolling morning mist stopped exactly at that point, and sunlight tentatively touched the tops of the ancient trees. Below all was darkness. But against the gloom moved a shape even darker still. It was the black of night and of nightmares and it undulated under the first of the old white pines. It could venture no further, confined by an invisible barrier as strong as the Gates of Hades. Not to venture down the flagstone path, out into the sunlight. Never again.

  Fingers of thought reached across the gulf of time and space between them and touched Elaine’s mind.

  Invasive, threatening.

  She struggled to push them away.

  The scent of cheap dime-store cologne filled the air. Too much, much too much, splashed on in anticipation of a lover’s arrival.

  Moira, Moira.

  A loon cried out through the mist, the sound, as always, heartbreakingly lovely. The dogs continued to bark.

  The mist shifted, just a fraction. More a thinning, a pruning of the haze than a clearing. Elaine’s heart pounded—she feared that her chest might burst open—and her breathing came short and sharp. But the instinctive reaction to danger was coming from without, not from the depths of her own mind or body.

  Moira, Moira.

  The shape moved beneath the wide arms of the old white pine. Elaine could see right through it to a squirrel sitting on the branches of a tree, clutching a nut to store over the long, harsh winter.

  I cannot go there. So you must. The colors of autumn disappeared. Brilliant, soft green spread out on the long branches of maples and oaks. Flowers burst from the cold soil to form a mass of color in the beds at the edges of the flagstone path. The gardener whistled as he worked. He carried a sharp spade, and dug vigorously into the rich brown topsoil, brought in by the truckload to give a touch of gentility to this land of unyielding rocks, at the few weeds that dared to pop their heads above his immaculate flowerbeds. He was young, smiling and enjoying the day. Elaine could see his body, broken and torn, his eyes wide and surprised; the rich, red Canadian blood leaking into the dark soil of the fertile, abandoned fields of Normandy.

  He smiled and touched his cap as a maid passed by. She tossed her black head in indignation, offended by the familiarity. He laughed and winked at her stiff, retreating back. She carried a tray, laden with glasses of fresh lemonade and crunchy oatmeal cookies, Cook’s specialty, and she was hot, very hot, in the black wool uniform, heavy stockings, and crisp white cap. The younger children laughed and played in the water; the dog barked from the shore. The older children, almost adults now, had company, young men and women from school or the city. They lay on striped deck chairs placed along the dock. Watching each other with bold glances or shy smiles. One of the young women, in—to Elaine’s critical, modern eyes—a hideously ugly high necked and skirted black bathing suit, held out her right hand lazily, her pink body drinking up the sun’s rays. The woman with the tray placed a glass into the open hand. One of the other women rose to her feet and relieved the maid of her heavy burden. Her mouth moved, but Elaine could not hear the words. The maid smiled. It was just a twitch of the edges of her generous red mouth, but the gratitude was palatable.

  A man half-rose from his lounge chair and patted the generous swell of buttocks beneath the stiff black maid’s dress. The girl jumped. She fled down the narrow path to the kitchen door, cheeks flushed, dark eyes burning with shame. They laughed, the sound following her as she walked, head held high, trying not to run, but the face of the woman who had taken the tray was set into an angry line, and she turned on the young man with the wandering hand. He laughed and pretended to be apologetic, an act that had the other girls giggling behind their upheld hands.

  The squirrel dashed down the tree trunk and disappeared into a pile of decomposing vegetation.

  Moira, Moira.

  The voice was in her head, but softer, further away than before. It was disappearing, drifting back into the cool depths of the forest. Time for Elaine to pull open the French doors and head to the kitchen for a drink.

  Or she could follow the beating of her heart and the frantic thoughts of a diaphanous, shifting apparition.

  They were on the dock; it was hard to see, through the
mist. She walked down the steps. She heard voices raised in anger. Soft voices, muffled by the fog. They cracked with age and were so overflowing with lifetimes of pent-up emotion that Elaine almost retreated in embarrassment.

  “You have to stop this. I’ve told you and told you. But will you listen? No. Like you never listened to a lick of common sense in your life.” Megan.

  “You are out of your mind, my poor dear, if you think I’m going to abandon the ambition of my old age to satisfy your strange sense of propriety. It’s the twenty-first century. No one cares anymore.” Moira.

  “Well, I care. I care.” Voice rising to a shriek. Megan.

  As Elaine moved closer they took form through the mist. The two sisters were at the edge of the dock. Moira in her chair, Megan standing in front of her. Cold gray water lapped at the pilings and disappeared into the mists beyond. A seamless blend of land and air and water, all of it mixing into pewter. The loon cried again.

  The elevated ramp that carried Moira’s chair up and down the hillside rested at the bottom of its route, at the head of the wide wooden dock. The chair was at the other end of the dock, close to the water. Moira had a thick shawl wrapped around her thin shoulders. A beautiful scarf, an inferno of red and orange, shot through with turquoise thread, fluttered around her neck.

  Her sister stood over her, dressed more sensibly in a dark blue Burberry raincoat but with incongruous white bedroom slippers, the kind Elaine’s mother called mules.

  What was real and what was imagination? Memories of the sun-drenched party were fading already, leaving nothing but a dreamy impression in Elaine’s mind. But the sisters were here and now. Weren’t they? She hesitated, trapped with no idea of what she should do. She didn’t want to interfere in a family quarrel, but something was truly amiss here. She opened her mouth to call out, to ask if everything was all right, when Moira struggled half to her feet, anger giving her arms the strength. “What would you do to stop me, Megan? How far would you go? How far have you gone?”

  “You were always the favorite.” Megan’s shriek had Hamlet barking in accompaniment. The dogs were as undecided as Elaine. They weren’t guard dogs, but they knew that their beloved owner was disturbed.

  “Mother loved you the most. Always. And you went away to war like you were so special. While I had to stay at home and look after Mother and run the house.”

  Moira laughed. A sound so strained with emotion and the simple physical effort of rising from her chair that it hardly seemed like a proper human laugh. “As if you had an ounce of energy or ambition in your useless life, Megan Madison Stoughton. It suited you perfectly well to sit at home and wait for the suitors to line up at the door. But I don’t want to dredge up the past. What I want to know now is what you had to do with Donna? Or the fire?”

  “She wasn’t a nice person, that Donna.”

  “You killed her because she wasn’t a nice person?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “An accident you caused, Megan.”

  “She was as common as dirt. I offered her money to just go away and leave us alone. But she said that if I was willing to pay, she’d hang around to find out just how high I would go. She was going to blackmail me.”

  “So you killed her.”

  “Not at all. She suggested that we talk down here, away from the party, where we wouldn’t be overheard. She stepped backwards and fell off the edge of the dock. I didn’t know she couldn’t swim. Anyone who can’t swim shouldn’t be spending time around the water.”

  “You didn’t call for help?”

  “The party was winding down, people were leaving. By the time I found someone it would have been too late.”

  “So when you realized that you couldn’t stop me by killing my biographer, and then trying to destroy the papers, you attacked me.” Moira’s voice was calm and steady. Strong, now, with no trace of old age or infirmity.

  “What attack? Your self-centered imagination is playing up again. Poor Moira. Everything has to be about you. Like when we were children. How you manipulated Grandmother into doting on you.”

  “You came into my room and put a pillow over my face. For some reason Elaine barged in at the right moment and scared you away.”

  “What nonsense. You do have to be the center of attention, one last time, don’t you?”

  “Not nonsense at all. I didn’t know what was happening, not then. But now that you’re standing upwind of me, I remember your scent. Chanel No. 5, isn’t it? You always wear No. 5. Before the pillow pressed down on me I smelt No. 5.”

  Megan screamed and lashed out. She was tiny and frail, but her rage gave her the strength she needed. Moira half stood at the edge of the dock, the one she had dived off as a child, posed flirtatiously on as a young woman, and watched nieces and nephews swim from as an indulgent elderly aunt. To Moira Madison it was truly a place of safety and comfort, if there were such a thing still to be found in the world.

  For one horrible second, shock and disbelief crawled over the tired old face. The diminutive body quivered. And then it was gone. Over the edge with a splash and a thin incredulous cry.

  Hamlet lifted his massive head and howled to the sky.

  Chapter Forty-two

  “What on earth is that noise?” Ruth asked, taking a sip of her tea.

  “Those blasted dogs, they don’t shut up for a single minute.” Lizzie bent into the fridge to select a variety of cold meat and cheeses. Her back turned, Alan slipped through her defenses and grabbed a hunk of bread.

  Lizzie whirled around and slapped his hand with a damp dishcloth. “Enough of that, my boy,” she said, sternly. “These sandwiches are for his Lordship ’imself. Fer the carriage ride back to London. ’Cause there ain’t no good inns on the way, you understand.”

  Alan and Kyle chuckled and pretended to dive at the slices of meat and cheese. Lizzie swatted at their darting fingers like the pests they were.

  “The grub’s plenty good here,” said Kyle, so well fed before and after a day’s work, he had no interest in the sandwich preparations, he only wanted to play the game. “But I don’t know if I could stand those damned dogs long enough to get through a meal.”

  Ruth picked up her teacup. “I hear something else. It sounds like someone’s crying.”

  Kyle laughed. “Oh, yes. It’s the ghost of Madison cottage. Crying ’cause she hasn’t got the prettiest gown at the ball.”

  Ruth ignored the comment and pricked up her ears. No one would be crying out loud in this house: terrible breach of good manners. It wasn’t crying, she heard. But screaming. An animal caught in a trap? Kyle was making the woo woo sound that represents ghostly moaning to doe-eyed children.

  “Shut up, you fool,” Lizzie said, her plump arms laden with sandwich fillings. “I hear something too.”

  Alan leapt to his feet. Kyle followed. Lizzie threw aside the packages of food, and Ruth gently put down her china teacup to bring up the rear.

  “Can’t you do something about those dogs, Manners?” Charles was on his way down the stairs, still fastening his tie. “Never heard such a blasted racket in all my life.”

  “On my way now, sir,” Alan said.

  “Let Alan handle it, Charles.” Maeve stood at the top of the stairs, still in her frothy nightgown. “We may not like them, but they are my sister’s dogs. Alan will calm them. I’m sure he’s extremely capable.” She offered what she thought of as her flirtiest smile, the one that had made her so popular in her youth.

  Alan burst through the French doors to the deck, his entourage following close behind.

  Once they were outside, no one could mistake the human screams for those of an animal. Falling over themselves, they tumbled down the steps and rushed along the flagstone path to the water’s edge. Ruth’s heart almost stopped when she saw Miss Madison’s wheelchair, toppled over, at the end of the dock. No sign of the elderly woman, but something thrashed in the water.

  Hamlet perched at the edge of the dock, his toenails hanging ove
r, barking as if his life depended on it. Ophelia, who hated the water, swam in circles around Elaine, bobbing in the gentle waves.

  Fully dressed, Alan hit the water with a wave-creating splash, Kyle following almost on the instant.

  Ruth stood on the dock, wrung her hands, and watched.

  Chapter Forty-three

  The water was dark, the consistency of thick tea or ink, caused, Elaine had read, by a high quantity of lead. Difficult to see much of anything, down there. The black water, the mist burning off under the growing strength of the sun, a splash of sunlight on a rogue wave, tiny silver fish scattering in their multitudes, a few larger ones gathering, sensing a feast.

  A startled white face and a flash of red and turquoise scarf and churning pale limbs.

  Elaine stared into the water for a few precious seconds. Gathering her wits at last she screamed as loud as she could and dove. The shock of her body hitting the cold was almost enough to knock the senses out of her, but she pulled her head back to the surface and screamed again. She struck out in long, powerful strokes to the spot where she’d seen Moira slipping under the waves. Elaine screamed with all the force she could muster as she grabbed the old woman and cradled the thin form to her chest. It was light, ethereal almost, despite being clothed in water-sodden wool and heavy running shoes. Moira said nothing, but she stared at Elaine with wide frightened eyes.

  Hamlet and Ophelia set up a tragic chorus of barking that would surely alert the entire county. Ophelia hit the water like a participant in a game of cannon bomb, so beloved of children around any sort of water. There was nothing she could do, and she knew it, but she would try. Hamlet rushed to the dock’s edge in a frantic attempt to keep an eye on both his mistress and his mate.

  The dog scarcely registered the impact as the force of his formidable bulk hit the fragile old woman who stood calmly at the edge of the dock, watching her sister struggle to live.

  Megan gasped. Her thin arms churned as she tried to keep her balance. But she failed, and toppled over into the water.