Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  The sun was nearly down; light cast squares upon the ground that stretched across the center of the barn. The large doors at the other side were tightly closed, cracks stuffed with cloth. To his left, in the rear and in the shadows, was the byre from which came rustles and the lowing sound of a cow. Part of a stone wall held a fireplace, and in front of it were a table and mismatched chairs. There was an old sink beneath another small window.

  At the end of the barn opposite the byre was a cot, layered in quilts. Beside this bed an upturned crate served as a case for books and a few records and beside it was a record player, older even than his own. On a low stool at the foot of the bed was the outline of a box beneath a black drapery. It appeared to be a little larger than a shoe box. A small table lamp stood on the crate, the light fanning out through the open circle of the shade over the bottom part of a big framed print of a house amidst dark trees. It was no more out of place in a barn, he thought, than the faded travel pictures of Venezio (which reminded him, for God's sakes, to call Vivian) and a view of the Cornwall coast, the frilled waves lashing the cliffside. Between them was an empty space with blobs of gum, as if another picture had hung there. Venice and Cornwall were faded, but the one of Elvis in his younger days appeared in mint condition.

  The little girl came out of the shadows of the byre, rolling up a poster that she held against her stomach. She was making a long and solemn job of it. Although she did not acknowledge the presence of a stranger in her barn, her down-turned eyes so firmly engaged with her task, he felt she knew he was there.

  "Hello," Jury said.

  She didn't answer; instead she concentrated on her rolling-job, stopping now and then to shove in the ends. Then she said, "I'm taking down Ricky Nelson."

  "The singer, you mean."

  The dark head nodded, still downturned. "He's dead." There was in her tone a finality that would have silenced any sentimental remark about finding comfort in mementos. She looked over to the hearth where lay the new poster pinned down by a hammer-weight on top and the sleeping dog on the bottom. The corners at the top curled inward. "I'm putting them up in his place."

  "They" were the members of the Sirocco band and, however they measured up to Ricky Nelson, they were, at least, alive. That seemed to be her estimate of the affair. It was the poster he'd seen further enlarged in the window of the record shop in Piccadilly. It was a rather austere and studied pose, Charlie Raine leaning against a leafless tree, which was the focal point, and the four others, looking off in other directions in an otherwise blasted landscape.

  Ricky Nelson had died some years ago, but perhaps in what looked to Jury like Abby's very patchwork past, events stitched together from piecework left behind by others—she had only recently come to realize that something else was gone from it. The mismatched clothes she wore fit the image, too: the somewhat muddy white shawl that reached down her back to her ankles, the zigzag-striped jumper and brown wool skirt, its hem covering the tops of old boots.

  Thus when she raised her face to give him a grim look, Jury was startled by its beauty. Her eyes were a deep blue that sea beyond Cornwall could never match. She said: "I don't think it's right to have a poster up of somebody dead." Here he saw her glance quickly toward Elvis pinned to the far wall near whom the Sirocco poster had been fixed. "I don't care if Ethel's mad. It's my barn." From a pocket hidden beneath the shawl, she took out a wad of stuff that looked like tangled string, found a rubber band, and rolled it carefully over the poster. Then she returned the blue eyes to him, apparently waiting.

  "Do you want me to help you tack that up?"

  She was not, clearly, to be fooled by some offer of help. "I expect you're another policeman."

  Under that blue stare, he felt more like a suspect. He smiled a little. "Was there one here before, then?"

  "Two. They kept asking questions. One was nearly as tall as you. He asked me did I like rock music." She looked at Jury, waiting.

  He might be taller, but was he smarter? "That's sort of obvious, isn't it?" She didn't verify this. "I don't ask a lot of questions."

  "They all ask questions." She was still clenching the rolled-up poster and Jury could see a slick of sweat from her palms where they'd moved up and down. "But they never tell you nothing. Except Aunt Ann had some kind of accident."

  The words came out slow and fine, as if they'd been ground like grit from millstone. She had found the lie in them.

  Silence filled the barn, broken only by the shuffling of the cow in its stall.

  "I've got to give it its medicine," she said quickly, the sick cow a welcome distraction from the topic at hand. "You can watch."

  "Sometimes I have to take care of Mr. Nelligan's sheep." She gave Jury a quick look to see, apparently, if he believed in this vetting of animals by a person so young.

  "Who's he?"

  Abby stoppered up the bottle and got down from the stool. "He lives out on the moor in an old caravan. He doesn't take care of them at all." She picked the poster from the dirt floor. Jury looked at the two doors of the empty stalls. On one was a poster of Mick Jagger, on the other, Dire Straits.

  "I'm putting this away," she said, walking over to an old steamer trunk. She bent down and unclasped the tarnished brass buckles, lifted the lid, and carefully placed the poster in it. Then she stood quickly, a furious look on her face, and let the coffin lid thunk down. "We're having our tea," she said, turning to the fireplace, where the collie now lay, beside the larger dog, paws outstretched, eyes drawing a bead on Jury's every move.

  Jury smiled slightly, assuming that "we" meant Abby and the dogs.

  "You can have some too," she said, without a clue as to whether she looked forward to this addition.

  "Thank you." In the grave preparation of the tea things, Jury said nothing; he doubted he could penetrate her thoughts, as tangled as the load of strings in her pocket.

  "I've only got tea bags," she said, lifting the top of a box of P&G's and setting several of them on the table.

  Jury smiled. "If they're good enough for Prince Edward they're good enough for me."

  Gazing at him over a little dish of buns, she looked puzzled.

  "There was a picture in the paper over a year ago of Edward going to his first job—he wants to be an actor. He was holding a box just like that." Jury nodded toward the P&G box.

  Still frowning, she dropped three tea bags in the pot. "Well, if I was his mother I'd see he got a proper tea." In a pique of anger, she plunked a bun apiece on two small plates. "He's all she's got left."

  This sad estimation of the sinking family numbers at the palace forestalled any comment on Prince Charles and his brother and sister. Those three were married and gone. "It must be hard on the Queen watching her children grow up and move away."

  She fiddled with her shawl, said nothing.

  Jury looked round the walls of the barn. "You have some very nice posters and pictures."

  After she'd wetted the tea, she said, "Ethel gave me the cat one." Abby pointed to a picture, one corner curling in for lack of a drawing pin. Her tone was uncertain, and she glanced at the trunk, as if the gift from Ethel was a task as yet unfinished in her mind, still causing her a muddle. The picture was one Jury had seen several times before—a popular and sentimental interpretation of childhood; a little girl in a thick, rich frock, holding a bowl of milk in her lap. Her dimpled smile was directed at an assortment of starveling cats meant to look sleek and rather rich, all waiting for their dinner.

  It must have reminded Abby of her dog, for she picked up the enamel pitcher and poured milk into a tin plate by the fire. The collie went busily to work on it. "She gave it to me probably because she thinks that girl looks like her. Ethel has reddish hair in curls like that. And white skin." Abby pulled her cheeks out with her fingers, distorting the heart-shape to something cartoonishly plump. "It's round, her face is," she said through tightly drawn, rubber-band lips. "Ethel's my best friend. What do you think?" she asked, waiting for the verdict to be handed
down. That Jury and Ethel had never met presented no problem to Abby. He should be able to decide from a combination of her description and the picture.

  He rose from his seat and walked over to the picture. The child there was snub-nosed, dimpled and too prissily dear to be believed.

  Until Abby cleared her throat, he hadn't realized she'd come up behind him. "Ummm." He cocked his head this way and that and said, "She looks sticky-sweet. And she also looks underneath as if she'd dump that basin of milk over that black cat that's clawing her dress."

  "That's Ethel," said Abby. She walked away.

  Jury's eye took in the rest of the barn at this end: the corner with the cot and the crate that held a stash of books and comics. "May I look at your books?"

  "Yes," she called over to him. "But I wouldn't look at Jane Eyre."

  "No? Why not?"

  "If you want to be sick."

  But Jane Eyre seemed to have got some rather thorough handling, despite its sick-making propensities. He leafed through it and saw the many downturned tips of pages. It was a heavy old volume, illustrated.

  "This one's better," she said, kneeling down to remove the black drape from the box that Jury could see now had held boots. She lifted the lid and pulled out a small book. "Mrs. Healey gave it to me. Her aunt brought it. I wish she'd come instead."

  It was the book of poetry Nell Healey had been holding when he saw her on the path. And it was a duplicate of the one in Billy Healey's room. He thumbed through it. Many of the same markings were there, and the same notes in the margins. "This looks like it might have been a favorite book."

  "It was." She took it back, returned it to the box, refitted the black cover.

  Jury frowned. "Why do you keep it in there?"

  "It's a hiding place. Come on." She rose and pulled at him, still crouched down.

  "Why is the box covered in black, then?"

  "Because it's for Buster's funeral. She died."

  She? "Was she a pet?"

  "My cat."

  Jury was fascinated. "Did you bury her?" Abby seemed surrounded by death.

  "Not yet. Come on."

  Back at the table, he watched her pour milk into her cup and add four teaspoons of sugar. She poured the same amount of milk into his and added the same four teaspoons of sugar.

  Silence seemed to crowd him as they each took a sip from their mugs and then sat back looking into the milky depths as if some tea-leaf fortune might be forming down there. The Queen might not make a proper tea, but Abby had at least torn the tea bags open and tapped the loose tea into the pot. It was covered with a towel in lieu of a cozy. Jury's mug had a picture of Winchester Cathedral on it.

  Abby lifted her head to look straight ahead of her and Jury followed her gaze. She was plucking at her shawl and staring at the little cot enclosure, the bookcase or, he thought, above it at the massive framed print.

  "Where did you get that one, Abby?"

  She looked away. "Billy's mum. Mrs. Healey." Then she turned a dark look on him. "You never found him."

  Her look did not suggest she was holding him personally responsible. But he was a policeman and he must bear the weight of the failure of his fellows. "I know."

  "He's gone. He's dead. He was my friend, him and Toby. We used to play a lot over there at his house. We climbed trees."

  In the starved orchard. Yet, she could have been no more than three or four.

  "So now I guess I get sent to Lowood School," she said, sitting stiffly. He opened his mouth to reply but she didn't give him a chance. "Well, if they think I'm stupid like Jane Eyre, they'll see. There's noheadmaster that's going to hang a cardboard round my neck." Her eyes narrowed, her mouth tightened, as if the grisly scene were being enacted right before her. "And if they think they're going to make me walk round and round out in the rain like that dumb Helen—" Swiftly she fired a glance at Jury. "Stranger'll be outside that wall and he'll get me out. I'm not walking round and coughing in the rain." Here she mimicked a coughing fit. "And then that Helen just lies in bed dying and smiling like the angels are all sitting there feeding her Kit-Kats." Furiously, she shook the black bobbed hair. "It sounds like Ethel."

  How long had she sat beneath that lamp poring over the details, hearing the rain on the old barn roof, the rain in the courtyard, the rain in her mind?

  Jury looked at the collie, sitting up, its ear perked, sensitive to some sign of distress. "This dog looks smart enough to save anyone."

  Abby was collecting the plates. "Except Jane Eyre. Nothing's smart enough to save her. She's hopeless." She held her cup as if it were a great weight in her rounded hands.

  "Like Ethel," said Jury. The corners of her mouth quirked upward.

  Jury looked at the painting on the wall on the other side of the barn. It was large enough that the details were clear. "I like your painting."

  Putting down the plates, she said, "It's my favorite." After a little silence while both looked at it, she said, "Why's it dark at the bottom with that house and those black trees like it's night, and the sky's blue above like it's day?"

  Jury shook his head. "I'm not sure," he said. Her expression told him he'd better come up with something better than that.

  Her voice rang out, "It's like a church."

  "I don't see what you mean."

  Abby leaned closer. "The tall tree looks like a steeple."

  He cocked his head, staring at the painting. "No, I don't think so." He felt her sidewise glance, heard her chair scrape back. Then she marched round the table to stand directly in front of him, the table between. "A steeple," she said again, raising her arms and pressing the palms of her hands together to illustrate, her cheeks glowing with the intensity of her conviction. Jury moved his head to see the painting, but she did a sidestep that blocked his line of vision. She had made her point, taken her stand, and no comparison with the real article was necessary.

  Jury blinked under the sheer force of her blue eyes.

  When he didn't respond, she dropped her arms. Then she came round the table and clenched his sweater sleeve, pulling at him. "Come on!" He allowed himself to be yanked from the bench at the same time she made a clicking sound with her tongue, and the dog rose immediately, alert. She was to deal a stunning blow to this man's perceptive powers, and a witness was needed. Stranger followed.

  The three of them faced the painting, "Empire of Light." Since she was to be guide in this museum, he let her continue:

  "There's that streetlamp. It's right in the middle." Then she was silent.

  He glanced down at her, saw she was chewing her lip, her arms folded tightly across her chest, her fingers plying the loose threads of shawl. Stranger looked up at Jury looking down as if he too wondered how this would extend her church analogy.

  "You're right about the streetlamp and the lighted windows." His eye traveled from the night below to the day above, a sky of light but vibrant blue, a pattern of white clouds drifting, and he wondered about the limits of his own mind. Of his compulsion to turn a whole into parts, into symbols and emblems. It was his job, in a way. The whole he couldn't see; he worked with bits of mirror, slivers of light. What was he last seen wearing? Identifying marks? Routine investigation. The streetlamp was the focus here; but if you looked at it too long, would it suddenly switch off? The painting hung in comfortable silence, perfectly accessible if one looked at it the right way.

  Her voice, in a higher register, broke into his thoughts, insistent: "It's better than Lowood School." Turning sharply, she stumped over to her crate-bookcase and hefted Jane Eyre to her chest with one arm, the other hand, finger wetted, shuffling through the pages with a furious energy of its own. Proof found, she marched back. "Here." She shoved the book forward, her finger stabbing the face of the master. He was thrashing a child with his cane.

  The picture spoke for itself. Wordlessly, she sat down on a milking stool, head bent as she flailed through this awful book, searching out further horrors.

  Jury kept his eye on the paint
ing as he said, "They can't send you to Lowood School. You're too important."

  Immediately, the rustle of pages stopped. He could feel her looking at him, but when he turned his head, her own head dropped her face almost flat against the open book, as she traced a line with her finger and pretended not to hear him.

  He said, "Perhaps you'll live in the 'Empire of Light.' " That he knew would be a notion so outrageously exciting that she could quarrel it down.

  Her head snapped up and the beguiling look of patience-being-tested-to-its-limits returned. If he was such a nit, she would have to be practical for both of them. "People can't live in pictures." She then lowered her head and sifted through the pages until she found another illustration to live in.

  "It's not as nice as your barn, but it might be just as real. You might be living in one of those lit-up rooms." He nodded toward the painting.

  "If it was real, you can bet Ethel would be living in the other one," she said to the book in her lap. "Besides, it's dark there."

  "Very dark in some way." He walked over and sat down in a rocker. From his pocket he drew a packet of Orbit gum. Sliding a stick out, he said to the crown of her head (still bent over the book), "Would you like some?"

  Abby looked at it, took the stick and seemed to study it to see if it was her brand, thanked him, and then took a dented metal box from the crate. She lifted the lid and put the gum inside. The box rattled as she returned it to the shelf. "He's all right, I expect," she said, turning the book so that Jury could see the illustration of the doctor who (the caption read) had come to tend Helen.

  "Yes." He rocked for a moment, as he watched her roll the page from the corner down, first with her finger, then with the palm of her hand, slowly. "Well, I can tell you something else that will probably happen, though it's not nearly as good as the 'Empire of Light.' Happen to you, I mean." Jury shoved a stick of gum into his mouth and waited as her face came slowly up. "It's much better than Lowood School, though you still might not like it much." He scratched his head. She put the book on the bed. "You see, your Aunt Ann owned the Hall. Now it belongs to you."