Grave Consequences

by Dana Cameron

  “You never did!”

  “We did so, Gareth. She was looking pretty down about something; I think she’d been on the phone to her dad.” Lucy looked sad. “Masses of problems in the family, I reckon. And so I just sort of suggested it, mostly to try and cheer her up.”

  “So what’d they say?” Will asked.

  She settled back and toyed with the coaster under her beer. “It wasn’t what I thought, it was all very flashy, high tech. Gave us recordings and all, didn’t they? I mean, they didn’t do us together, but I just asked about grades and you know, whether a certain someone was coming back from Jordan soon to sweep me off my feet—”

  Here there was some laughing at an inside joke. “So what did the psychic say?” I asked.

  “Oh you know.” Lucy waved her hand. “Usual. Loads of work ahead of me, but I’ll succeed in the end.”

  “And was that with regards to a first or Maurice, d’you reckon?”

  There was some playful scuffling between Lucy and Gareth. Nicola said, “I’m sure Julia was asking about exam questions or the like. I mean, I never saw her with a boy. Twenty-two and no men in your life? What’s the point?”

  “You are being mean. She was perfectly nice; she helped me whenever I was having problems with my theory. I hate theory. And she did so have a boyfr—” But Lucy clammed up very quickly.

  “Come on, you can’t just leave it there.” There was silence in the group after Will’s pleading, hoping to force her into an answer.

  Lucy hesitated. “I wasn’t supposed to know. She…well, I’m sure it wouldn’t do her any harm now, poor thing, but she was seeing someone…someone she wasn’t supposed to be seeing, and I wouldn’t want to get him in trouble, would I? Besides, I think she thought it was nearly over, so it doesn’t matter, does it, so I would never say to anyone. No call to.”

  Oh, yes, there was plenty of call to, I thought. Good God, it makes all the difference in the world.

  “Come on, who was it?” Nicola said. “Whisper it to me, I won’t tell anyone…” She winked at the rest of us.

  “You can be such a bitch, sometimes! You don’t care about anyone, do you, Nicola?”

  And with that, Lucy shoved her way out from the table and out of the pub.

  “Lucy, come on! God, Nicola.” Gareth ran after her.

  “And I think we’d better be heading off. Sorry, Professor Fielding. I guess feeling about Julia is still running a bit high for Lucy. For all of us, really.” Will paused awkwardly. “Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

  “Thanks.”

  I found myself alone again, but with a whole new set of worrying thoughts. A boyfriend she wasn’t supposed to be seeing? Who might have been ending things, she or him? This put a whole different light on the situation and suddenly, I wanted to meet the young stranger who’d accosted me outside the Fig and Thistle again. The thought of Greg’s unwonted and unpleasant volubility of Wednesday evening also sprang into my mind. What had he said, “I tried to give her the space she wanted…I don’t like to think how I tried”? Whose space had he tried to respect? Had he meant that he didn’t like to think how hard he had to work to put Jane from his mind or that he didn’t like to think, literally, about what he’d done to try and ignore Jane? Had he had an affair with Julia? Or was it something much worse than that? Had he killed her, to take some of the burden from Jane?

  Greg loved Jane, that much was obvious. He’d repeatedly said he’d do anything for her, and frankly, it was a little scary to see the changes he went through the other night. I wasn’t sure how to explain it. I knew how much I loved Brian, so much that I felt like I had to shut down that part of my life when I was away from him so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by what I was missing, what I was so used to having near to me. I would try to fill that void with work, to make the time pass faster, and that worked to a certain extent. But it was like having a limb amputated and trying to ignore that it was gone. I could function perfectly well, for a while, until that next phone call came and I remembered what life was usually like. That was the hardest, just after the phone calls. And I knew Brian felt the same way as Greg, he’d do anything for me, though he’d never said it like that.

  The difference between Brian and Greg was that Brian was sure I’d come back. Greg wasn’t sure about Jane at all.

  Greg was desperate.

  What if Greg had tried to remove some of Jane’s fear of being outstripped for her. What if he’d tried to remove at least one of “the Julias in the world”?

  One horrendous thought immediately liberated me to think another. I recalled Greg’s rapid changes in mood that evening, and, at the end, how various degrees of anger, sadness, and despair had vanished or seemed to with Brian’s phone call. All of it was gone in an instant. Had all that emotion been some kind of show, a distraction, like a bird dragging its wing as if wounded, to lead a predator from the nest? Had Greg been trying to draw attention to himself because I had been getting too close to finding out something about Jane and Julia? Surely Jane wasn’t that insecure…but she had told Andrew not to underestimate what she would do to protect her position…

  I shuddered and shoved my beer glass away. I couldn’t put the thoughts away from me so easily, though I decided I couldn’t pursue them any further at the moment. Merely thinking them had been enough; they wouldn’t fade and I knew I would eventually have to come back to them, with a more critical eye and a firmer resolve. But for now, I could convince myself that I would still be doing justice to my involvement in this mess by studying Morag’s file of information about Mother Beatrice.

  The file folder was an old one, pale lilac in color; the fine creases that had been worn in from being carried about were darker, giving the thing the look of flesh, aged and veined. Longer than the files I was accustomed to, to accommodate the longer A-4 paper that was standard in Britain, the folder also felt different, a little less rigid, maybe. I catalogued these details casually and opened the file.

  There wasn’t much in it, really, and everything there was a photocopy, presumably of Morag’s original findings. Nice as it would have been to have the originals—to get as close to the same experience as Morag had had in handling them—I noticed a few things about the copies as well. The first one, for example, was a copy of a newspaper clipping that had been held in a clear plastic sleeve to protect it. The image of the sleeve, and the lint and dust that clung to it, was like a film, a thin veil over the image of the clipping, which looked quite dark and crepey with age. Even if someone hadn’t written the date in pen in the corner of the photocopy, June 12, 1908, I would have guessed that the newspaper article was old by the fine web of lines across it and the old fashioned style of the print itself. Even the tone of the article, a little summary of the history of antiquities and curiosities of Marchester, felt creaky to me, personal and didactic, almost conversational in style, as if an old professor was used to lecturing spontaneously and unchallenged on any topic, a far cry from the impersonal reportage of today. “And, if the visitor is pleased to turn to his left and follow the river past the new church of St. Alban’s—noting the lovely windows, designed in 1732—he will come upon the ruins of Marchester Abbey—” The photocopy had been carried around for a long time.

  The next photocopy was several pages long and from a book of late nineteenth-century vintage on the history of Marchester and Marchester-le-Grand by Geoffrey Reese. These photocopies were from the section on the churches and several paragraphs that had been underlined in pencil described the abbey and in one line, the presence of Mother Beatrice and her works there. One poetical turn of phrase caught my eye: “And she tended the poor and the sick, the living and the dead, all the days of her life.” That reminded me of the newspaper article I’d just seen, wherein a line ran very similarly: “And for the rest of her life, she tended the poor and the sick, as well as the living and the dead.” It seemed perfectly clear to me that the author of the newspaper article had read, digested, and used the text in the book by Mr. Rees
e. I wondered if the phrase hadn’t come from a translation of a description in Latin or old French, and this would explain its slight oddness to modern eyes. There was an asterisk and I would have checked for end notes, but whoever had copied the section hadn’t also included the notes section or the title of the book for me to note.

  A much more recent encyclopedia article about Marchester and other towns in the central south coast had but a single line, stating that among the events of the late fifteenth century was a line from another, uncited church history describing a falling out between the abbess and the church fathers, who had at first cut off then reinstated funding to the abbey after Mother Beatrice’s time. This one had someone’s—presumably Morag’s—flowery handwriting in the corner, where she recorded the date and the name of the volume: 1987.

  Even more recent than that was a clipping from a magazine, The New Pagan’s Almanack, only about five years old, that had a very amateurishly done pen-and-ink drawing of a medieval-style lady—complete with a veil and wimple and embellished with background whorls—who was meant to be Mother Beatrice. The article was two pages long, one page of which was devoted to the title and the picture, by “Rowan Blessingtree,” who claimed to channel denizens of the spirit world. The article was poorly written, and the few facts that I was aware of from my readings on the abbey were badly mangled; dates were off by fifty years or more, names were misspelled, and a picture of a brooch was at least two centuries too early. This seemed to be where Morag was getting most of her information about Mother Beatrice; as far as I could tell, the information that she’d been persecuted for her supposed pagan beliefs was based on none of the information that I’d seen; Rowan Blessingtree hadn’t even read the old book by Reese. Like the other photocopies that were in the file, this article had no bibliography or a notes section.

  There was nothing else. I sighed and stacked everything carefully back into the file, reminding myself that I should show it to Jane, so that she could check it out, if she hadn’t already. She might even know the source of the quote in the local history and the newspaper story, I thought. Maybe she’d want to make a copy of the article about Mother Beatrice, just for a private souvenir—it would be very interesting to see whether she could explain why some of these notions had found their way into print. From little mistakes like this, whole histories had been diverted down wrong paths. Misinterpretation—cultural or translational—was probably responsible for more historical inaccuracies than anything else. I should also show her the picture I’d drawn of Jeremy’s painting and Dora’s note. Maybe she could make something of that.

  I thought about having another beer, but then checked my watch and realized that it was very late. I needed to make an appearance back at Jane and Greg’s at some point, and it might as well be now. With another sigh, I put Morag’s folder under my coat and headed out once again into the rain, hoping that I wasn’t making any of those little mistakes that would send me chasing after wild geese.

  The next morning, Sunday breakfast was a rather more elaborate affair than usual. It took my mind off my worries and also made up for another round of early morning nightmares, just the same as the ones that had greeted me each dawn for the past couple of days. Jane had gotten up and made strawberry crepes for us, complete with a rich filling that I suspect was at least half sour cream, half cream cheese, and half crème fraîche. Better than that, Jane brought out the Bodum coffee plunger again and I was as content as I could be. For the moment. No sooner had we finished, lingering another few moments over the empty dishes and a lazy, show-offy argument about a crossword clue in the Sunday paper, than Jane announced that she had to get right to work.

  I expected Greg to speak up at this point, but he didn’t. So I did. “On Sunday too? I was—”

  “Afraid I won’t be able to make it out to the site tomorrow,” Jane broke in, her voice brittle, avoiding my glance. “It’s back to the station for me, I’m afraid, and another bloody round of questions. So I’d like to get things sorted today, try not to lose too much time.”

  I dropped the fork I’d been toying with with a clatter. How could she do this, prepare a breakfast like the one we’d had, make pleasant and erudite conversation, and then casually announce that she was going in for a second round of questioning about a murder? It was clear to me that Jane was unhappy about the situation, but her capacity for compartmentalization was nothing short of miraculous. I would have sent everyone off to the pancake house and then retired to a hot bath with a bottle of whiskey. No, that wasn’t fair to Jane: when I had been in a similar situation, I’d behaved almost as—what? Coolly? Competently?—when I’d packed up the field school and decamped Penitence Point. Except that I remember losing my cool a little more often, letting the ragged veil slip a little more noticeably.

  What’s more, did I, as a house guest, need to refrain from asking too many questions about one’s session with the cops? As a friend, was I obliged to? And I couldn’t help but wonder what the police made of an interviewee who was so cool, so self-possessed. “What do they want now?” I asked.

  “Trying to confirm a few things, is all they’ll tell us,” Greg answered. “Though if you ask me, I think they’ve a lot of cheek.” He turned to his wife. “There’s absolutely no reason for this, not even circumstantial evidence to link you to Julia’s death. And I think it’s time we called the lawyer who was recommended to you by Sabine.”

  Jane nodded agreement and pushed back her chair. “You can look after yourself, right, Emma? I feel awful about not being able to spend more time with you, but I’m afraid it’s just bad luck.” She made as if to shift the dirty dishes to the sink, when I stopped her.

  “If you want to get to work, go straight ahead. I’ll take care of these. Greg, what are you up to this morning?”

  “Actually, after I get done tending to Hildegard’s tank, I thought I’d see if Aunty wanted to go to church. She was very blue yesterday, I’ve never seen her so down. I’ll take her in for one of Sabine’s shockingly liberal sermons and see if that doesn’t fan her up a bit.”

  “Is she coming for dinner tonight?” Jane said. “Mads often comes for dinner on Sunday nights,” she explained to me.

  “I shouldn’t plan on it,” Greg replied. “I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get her to go to church with me.”

  “Off you go, then,” I said. “I’ve got this under control, and I’ll just go for a bit of a stroll later, so we’re all set.”

  “Thanks so much, Emma. I knew I could rely on you,” Jane said.

  I looked up from clearing the table. My friend’s words had been perfectly level. Not a break or a hitch or a hesitation or any emotion of any sort whatever. Her face was hard and I thought I saw a peevish look vanishing as I watched, as though my own self-reliance was some irritation, some threat to her. She went upstairs, followed by Greg.

  I shrugged and put the rest of the dishes in the sink, looking around for the dish detergent. I found a heavy white bottle marked “Fairy Liquid,” strangely industrial looking for its purportedly ethereal contents, and squirted some of the green liquid into the hot water. If my friends were going to slide so comfortably into their accustomed roles, Jane the workaholic, Greg the St. George in search of a lady to defend, then I could at least be graceful enough to get on with the one I’d assumed, which was—what? Nosy Parker? Optimistic, can-do American? I didn’t know. But apparently I did. Even before I knew that I had a plan, even before the dish liquid had risen up in a steamy froth of bubbles, I realized that I was going to use the newspaper article about Julia’s death and disappearance and retrace her steps as closely as I could.

  I borrowed Jane’s map of the town, Marchester A–Z (momentarily confused when she’d pronounced it “aytozed”), and found where Julia’s apartment had been. It was on the other side of the river from the site, in a part of town that was busy during the week, with small shops and a local market nearby. It was in a run-down block, but not worrying, more like “cheap and cheerful.
” After mustering a little courage, I went up to the front door and looked at the names next to the buzzers on the intercom: “Whiting, J.” was on the third floor. I went back across the street and looked up at the third—no, fourth floor—Jane always referred to the first floor as the “ground floor.” There were curtains over the two windows. One was made out of a large piece of cloth, a dark blue Indian-looking print, and the other was also dark blue but not matching otherwise; they hung askew. It would have been walking distance to the university from here, with the site even closer. It might have been Julia’s first place on her own, after a lifetime in her parents’ home, school dormitories, and university housing. The hopefulness of place made me unbelievably sad. To someone on her own for the first time, it would have seemed a palace, all the necessities at hand.

  Next I checked the map to see where 375 Green Cross Road was. Although it was quite a piece away from the apartment, back over the bridge and to the east of the site, the new church, and Julia’s house, I didn’t mind the walk. In fact, I found myself walking more and more slowly toward the Whiting residence, my stomach knotting itself until it sent tingles up my spine.

  The Whiting house was in a cul-de-sac that appeared to be secluded from the rest of the town, hidden by a cleverly maintained stand of trees. The metaphorical distance between Julia’s apartment and this place could not have been greater. In fact, the difference between number 375 and the other places in this upscale neighborhood was striking. Number 375 was older than most of the houses in town, but was still only of 1920s vintage, an elephantine mock-Tudor in superb condition: no flaking paint, no shabby, lived-in gentility, none of the relaxed, benign neglect that characterized the rest of the street. The lawn and shrubs I could see in the front were maintained with a precision that I found off-putting. The grass was as smooth and green as a cut emerald, the half dozen evergreen shrubs that hid the foundation were topiary mounds, their bottom branches trimmed a uniform six inches from the ground, so that the effect was one of a row of hoop-skirted ladies coyly showing their ankles. There wasn’t a stray leaf or branch lying underneath the trees, not a flower that leaned out of its rank, and crabgrass would have been ashamed to consider showing itself there. I began to think that there were undergardeners who remained concealed until a pine cone dared fall, and then ran out to scoop the errant vegetation up in a fluid motion, like the ball boys on a tournament tennis court. The notion that a child’s ball or a pet dog would have been prohibited from this space sprang to mind. The whole facade announced: we are immaculate, we are respectable, we have arrived, and you will never see the seams where we snuck in. Noli me tangere. I thought longingly of the happy mess I’d left at home and experienced a profound pang of homesickness.