Aunt Bessie Volunteers

by Diana Xarissa

  “He was her husband. Yes, I think she made a bad choice, but he was still her husband.”

  “And he may still be her husband. My only interest in Meredith was in finding out whether she was our skeleton or not. It seems she is not.”

  Maggie took a deep breath and then drank the rest of her tea. “I can’t believe you won’t tell me everything she said. It isn’t as if I’d repeat it.”

  Bessie hid a smile behind her teacup. Maggie was incapable of keeping secrets. “It isn’t my story to tell, though. If you really want to know what happened, maybe you should ask Joe.”

  “I may just do that,” Maggie said, getting to her feet. “Now that I know he didn’t kill her, I’m far less afraid of him.”

  “If you do decide to talk to him, make sure you do it somewhere public,” Bessie said quickly. “He may not want to discuss Meredith, and he has been known to get violent when angry.”

  Maggie shrugged. “The only place I’ll ever find him is at the pub, anyway. I wonder if Dan Ross knows about Meredith.”

  “She’s spoken to the police. I doubt they’ll tell him anything, though.”

  “I should ring Dan, then,” Maggie said as she headed to the door. “He’s always so very grateful when I share news with him.”

  Which is why I don’t share anything with you, Bessie thought as she let Maggie out. She shut the door behind her and then sat back down with her tea. Maybe Dan could talk to Joe and get enough of the story to satisfy both himself and Maggie, she thought.

  The tea hadn’t created enough washing-up for Bessie to bother with, even though she hated leaving dirty things in the sink. She’d wash them when she washed the lunch dishes. That was a better use of her hot water supply. Frowning, she left the room so that she didn’t have to look at the offending cups any longer. Grabbing her book, she sat down in her favourite chair and began to read.

  The book wasn’t a particularly long one, and it seemed only minutes later when Bessie found herself reaching the climax. She turned the page and read about the knock on the door. The cats were racing around, shouting, as the protagonist walked towards the door. Bessie turned the page as her telephone rang. She thought about ignoring it, but then she remembered that Emma Gibson was meant to be ringing. That was worth interrupting her reading for, she decided, if only just.

  “You’d better not be selling double glazing,” she said before she picked up the phone.

  Chapter 8

  “Miss Cubbon? Or should I say Aunt Bessie? It’s Emma Gibson,” the voice on the phone said.

  “Emma, it’s good to hear from you,” Bessie exclaimed. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” she said after a short pause.

  “You don’t sound certain.”

  “This is just, I don’t know, odd. The idea that people think I might be dead is strange, for a start.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, no one was worried about you until the skeleton turned up at Peel Castle.”

  “It doesn’t make me feel better at all. It’s horrible that someone has been lying there, dead, for all these years. I can’t imagine how the poor woman got stuck in there or why no one found her until now.”

  “The police are trying to answer both of those questions.”

  “It seems to me that they’re much busier harassing my mother than answering those questions.”

  “Have they been harassing her?” Bessie asked, surprised.

  Emma sighed. “Probably not nearly as much as she thinks they have. She regards anyone who asks anything about me as troublesome, though.”

  “As long as you are alive and well, the questions will stop. You simply need to let the police know that you’re fine.”

  “I’ve already spoken to an Inspector Anna Lambert. She was the one who was bothering Mum. I believe she’s satisfied that I’m perfectly fine.”

  “They’ll be happy to be able to cross you off the list.”

  “And you’ll be able to stop the rest of the gossip, won’t you?”

  “I’ve no control over the island’s gossip,” Bessie chuckled. “You should remember, from when you lived here, that the island thrives on skeet. I’m sure people will get bored with talking about you in another day or two, though.”

  “Skeet,” Emma laughed. “I haven’t heard that word in a long time. You’re right, of course, there isn’t much else on the island for people to do besides gossip. And yes, in another twenty-four hours something far more exciting will happen and I’ll be forgotten again. I just hate to see my mother so upset, that’s all.”

  “Your mother should be happy that you are alive and well,” Bessie suggested.

  “She is, of course, but she’s also worried that people will find out why I left the island.”

  “I won’t ask, as it isn’t any of my business unless it had something to do with the dead woman at Peel Castle.”

  Emma laughed again. “My goodness, my life isn’t anywhere near that interesting. I left for my own reasons, not ones that I’m embarrassed about, but ones that make my mother uncomfortable.”

  Bessie nodded. “And those reasons keep you from visiting, as well. Do you miss the island?”

  There was a long silence at the other end. Bessie worried that she might have upset the woman. She opened her mouth to apologise, just as Emma spoke.

  “I do miss the island, actually. We’ve been talking about visiting one day, but my mother would it prefer if we didn’t. She’s as supportive as she can be, but she still finds it difficult.”

  It took a great deal of effort, but Bessie managed to swallow all of the questions that sprang into her head. “If you do visit, you’re welcome here for a cuppa,” she said after a minute.

  “You truly mean that, don’t you? Even though you’ve no idea why I left the island or what I’ve done since.”

  “I remember you when you were six. You were playing on the beach with a few other children and one of them, a much older lad, started throwing rocks at the seagulls. You got incredibly angry and shouted at him. Do you remember?”

  “I do. He pushed me over into the water and I started to cry. His mother made him apologise and then took him home. I was with Granny, and she brought me to your cottage so that I could get out of my wet clothes and dry off. I sat in your kitchen, wrapped in a towel, and told you the whole story about the rocks and seagulls while Granny went home to get me dry things.”

  “You were a lovely child with impeccable manners. I’m sure you’ve changed a lot in the last thirty-odd years, but I believe you can tell a lot about what sort of adult a person will be if you get to know him or her as a child.”

  “You’re probably right. I’m awfully glad I made a good impression on you all those years ago, anyway. I still get upset when I see people mistreating animals or other people.”

  “For what it’s worth, the young man who pushed you into the sea is now a secondhand car salesman with a reputation for being less than honest about the cars that he sells.”

  Emma laughed. “That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. He’s still on the island?”

  “Oh, yes. He’s been married three times and has four children. Three of them work for him, and I wouldn’t buy a car from them in an emergency.”

  “What about the fourth child?”

  “The youngest boy, Trevor, is an environmental activist. He works for a charity in the UK, raising money to protect wildlife. He and his partner, Doug, have been together for twenty years, but his father still doesn’t approve of the relationship. He doesn’t seem to mind when his other children get married and then divorced over and over again, but then, as I said, he has been married three times himself.”

  “Do Trevor and Doug visit the island?”

  “They do. They stay in a hotel rather than with Trevor’s parents, but they do visit. He loves the island, and he does some fundraising over here on a volunteer basis when he can.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Is it? Are you involved with wi
ldlife good causes?”

  “No, not at all. It’s interesting because I’m involved with another woman.”

  Bessie chose her next words carefully. “Is that what your mother wants to keep secret?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course. I may as well tell you the whole story, now that I’ve told you the only interesting part.”

  Bessie chuckled. “If that’s the only interesting part, I’m not sure I want to hear the whole story.”

  Emma laughed. “You probably don’t, but I’d like to tell you anyway, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind. I assume you don’t want me to repeat any of it, though.”

  “I don’t really care what you repeat, but it would probably break my mother’s heart if people on the island found out about me. She’s been keeping it a secret for such a long time. Please don’t tell anyone my story. I didn’t even tell the police all of this, because they didn’t need to know it.”

  “I’ll simply tell people that you’re alive and well,” Bessie assured her, deciding that she’d have to avoid Maggie for a while. She didn’t want to annoy her by again not revealing everything she knew.

  “I was a teacher,” Emma began. “I taught primary school for three years and that was more than enough time for me to realise that I didn’t really care for children.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Yes, exactly. I also knew I was different in that I wasn’t interested in men. Mum wanted me to get married and make her a grandmother, but that was the last thing I wanted to do. The only thing I really wanted to do was travel. I loved the island, but I knew there was a big world out there and I wanted to see more of it. I was still living at home, so I’d been able to save up some money. That summer, when school broke up for summer holidays, I went off to have an adventure.”

  “And you never came back,” Bessie said after a long pause.

  “No, I didn’t. Neither did Janice, but no one is looking for her.”

  “Janice?”

  “Janice Smith. She was another teacher at the same school where I was teaching. She was a comeover, though, not Manx. She’d done her teacher training and then decided to teach her way around the world. She was going to get jobs at schools in different places, a year or two at a time, until she’d been everywhere.”

  “That sounds fascinating.”

  “I thought so, too, except for the part about teaching. As I said, I don’t really like children. Janice loves them, as long as they all go home at the end of the school day.”

  “So you left together?”

  “We did. Janice had taught on the island for a year and had decided that that was enough. The island was too much like home, which in her case was Birmingham. She wanted to go to more exotic places and she invited me to come along. We were just friends at that point. I didn’t really understand that I was a lesbian. Such things weren’t really discussed in those days. I just thought I wasn’t interested in men.”

  “I hope things are easier for children today.”

  “They seem to be. Anyway, I keep getting sidetracked from my story. Janice and I left the island, intending to be away for five weeks. Well, I was going to be gone for five weeks. Janice wasn’t planning on going back to the island. She had a teaching job lined up in Canada for September. We took my car across to the UK and then took the car ferry over to France. From there, we just started driving, stopping to see whatever caught our fancy. By the end of the five weeks, I was madly in love and, luckily for me, Janice felt the same way.”

  “So you decided not to return here.”

  “I went to Canada with Janice. For the first year or two, we maintained the fiction that we were just friends, but over time we both came to hate lying about our relationship. I finally told my mother everything just before she was due to visit us in Canada. She opted not to come.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I understood. This was thirty years ago and attitudes were very different. Janice has lost jobs over our relationship, and we’ve had difficulties renting places to live, as well.”

  “You haven’t been teaching?”

  “No, I haven’t. I’m a writer. I write romance novels for one of the large publishing companies, the type that put out dozens of new books every month. I write under several different pen names. The years that Janice and I spent travelling allow me to set my stories all over the world. I make decent money and I have the flexibility to go wherever Janice wants to go next. They don’t care about my private life, either, as long as my stories are believable.”

  “I wonder if your mother is embarrassed about that, too.”

  Emma chuckled. “She may be, at that. I’m sure she would be if I were straight and happily married, but the whole lesbian thing overshadows everything else.”

  “But you and Janice are still together?”

  “Oh, yes, we’re like an old married couple now. We’ve travelled the world, though. She taught English in China, Japan, Russia, South America, and New Zealand. I could go on and on, but I won’t. Suffice to say that we lived her dream of teaching just about everywhere. I got to see the world in ways I never imagined I would. My writing brought in little extras over the years, let us live a bit more comfortably than we might have on just one income. Now it’s funding our retirement, as neither of us has much in the way of a pension.”

  “You’re both retired?”

  “Janice is retired. She burned out a bit near the end, but she’d taught for over thirty years in every imaginable condition. We spent a year in the Middle East where she taught at a very expensive private school. The class sizes were tiny and the children were so well behaved as to be slightly scary. She also taught for a year in India at a school that was nothing but a flat patch of earth in the middle of a village. No walls or roof, no furniture, no books, just her and a group of ten to thirty children, depending on what else was happening in the village at the time. Thirty years was enough.”

  “I should think so.”

  “We’re in Birmingham now. Her parents are both gone, but her brother lives here and he’s been very kind. He and his wife treat me as if I’m one of the family and their children and grandchildren are very special to us. Mum visits occasionally. I think about visiting the island, but I wouldn’t do it if I couldn’t bring Janice, and that would make Mum uncomfortable.”

  “Ideas are changing, even on the island. Maybe you’ll be able to visit one day.”

  “I’d like to think so, but I truly don’t want to upset Mum. If she’d rather we not come, that’s fine, too. I’ve been all over the world. The island will always be home for me, but I’ve come to appreciate Birmingham. After everything we’ve seen and done, wherever Janice is, that’s home, anyway.”

  “It sounds as if you’ve had an amazing life.”

  “It has been pretty amazing. It’s funny, though, wherever we’ve been in the world, we always used to laugh about how the day-to-day chores remain the same. We still had to grocery shop and cook and clean, whether we were in a tiny house in India or a mansion in the Middle East.”

  “Where was your favourite place?”

  “That’s an impossible question. I enjoyed different things about different places. Some of how I felt about a particular place is also tied to where we’d been just before it, too. The first place we went after India felt incredibly luxurious, even though it wasn’t really. Canada felt much like the UK because we went there immediately after we’d left here, but when we went to Canada again a few years later, after a stint in Europe, it didn’t feel at all familiar.”

  “You should write a book about your travels.”

  “I’ve been trying to persuade Janice to write about her experiences, actually. She can talk for hours about the children she taught.”

  “If she ever does write the book, let me know. I’d love to read it.”

  “I’ll tell her that. Maybe it will motivate her.”

  “I’m awfully glad that you’re doing so well. I’m sure the police were happy to c
ross you off the list of possible candidates for the body from Peel, too.”

  “Inspector Lambert didn’t sound very happy when I spoke to her,” Emma replied. “She sounded a bit annoyed, really. I didn’t tell her all the things I told you. I simply told her that I was alive and well. I gave her my passport number so that she could confirm that I’m who I claim to be, and that was pretty much the extent of our conversation.”

  “Whom do you think we found, then?” Bessie asked, wishing she’d thought to ask Meredith the same question.

  “My goodness, how should I know?”

  “Do you remember anyone else leaving the island in the year or so before you left? Someone who left and never came back?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t pay that much attention to other people in those days. I was busy with work, of course. Mum used to talk about people. We were still living together, but I don’t really recall anything specific. Let me think for a minute, though.”

  Bessie let her mind wander back to her book as she waited. Who was at the man’s door? There were only two good possibilities, although there was a third that Bessie knew she’d find less satisfactory. She was frowning over the various different plot resolutions that she’d imagined when Emma spoke again.

  “It’s no use. I can’t remember anyone’s name or anything else. I’m sure Mum told me about various people leaving the island, affairs, and all manner of things, but it’s all just a blur. I’m going to talk to Janice, though. She used to keep journals where she recorded various things. She may have made notes on some of the things that happened on the island. I’ll ring you back tomorrow or the next day.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Bessie said. “At this point, the police need all the help they can get.”

  “What makes you so sure the victim was from the island? Surely she could simply have been visiting?”

  “If she’d just been visiting, she should have been missed when she didn’t return home.”

  “There are people who don’t have anyone to miss them,” Emma said. “Janice and I met a few of them over the years, people who could vanish tomorrow and not be missed. I hope your woman isn’t one of those.”