The Case of the Missing Letter

by Alison Golden

  “Well, it’s been nice to meet you, Detective Inspector. I’m sure we’ll meet again.” Laura turned to Mrs. Taylor and an almost imperceptible flash of her eyes told the guesthouse proprietor that she’d been rumbled. This impromptu speed-dating interview was over.

  Mrs. Taylor shepherded Laura back to reception and then upstairs, but not before throwing a self-satisfied smile over her shoulder at Graham.

  “For crying out loud,” he muttered as he sat once more and refreshed his tea cup. But he found himself smiling, and not purely, if he were honest, because of the glowing newspaper article.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DON ENGLISH WOKE to the sound of his mother softly singing along with the radio. The room’s blinds were open, and bright afternoon sunshine gave a warm luster to the yellow tulips by Susannah’s bed. Don shifted in the armchair and rubbed his eyes. He watched for a moment as his mother sang quietly, mumbling most of the words, her eyes closed, and a happy little smile on her face. It was something by the Beatles, but he didn’t know the name.

  “How are you feeling, Mum?” he asked. He pushed his heavy, soft bulk out of the chair with a groan and stood by her bed, flexing his left foot that had gone to sleep during his half-hour nap. “You’ve always liked this song, haven’t you?”

  Susannah was smiling contentedly to herself. Her eyes opened. She seemed not to take in her surroundings for a long moment, and when she finally turned to Don, there was a visible struggle in her eyes. Finally, she asked, “Play it again?”

  Don sat on the bed and took her hand in his. He was finding it remarkably slight and cool these days, her skin mottled with age and soft like an old parchment. “It’s on the radio, Mum,” he reminded her. “What’s the name of the song?” he prompted hoping to focus her thought.

  But it was too late, Susannah was focused on the tulips. “Who brought those?” she asked, gazing at them. “They’re lovely.”

  “I did, Mum,” Don replied. It could not have been anyone else.

  “Oh, thank you, sweetheart,” she said, just as she had an hour ago and twice yesterday. “You’re always so good to me.” Another song came on, something from the sixties that Susannah recognized, and she had her eyes closed again, humming to the chorus.

  Don held her hand, feeling the tiny tapping of her fingers on his palm as she followed the beat. As the song ended, Susannah’s eyes stayed closed, and her hand was still once more. He listened closely and found that her breathing was regular and slow. “You have another little nap, Mum,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Going to find some coffee. I’ll be right back.”

  St. Cuthbert’s was a bright, airy place with the most thoughtful and attentive staff anyone could hope for, and certainly a huge improvement upon his mother’s dreary existence at Kerry Hill. He had come to know two or three of the nurses who were competent and kind. The most senior of them, Nurse Watkins, was responsible for implementing day-to-day medical decisions regarding his mother’s “palliative care.” After three weeks here, Susannah Hughes-English was reaching the end. Don caught the nurse as she left the reception area.

  “Oh, hello Don, m’love. How’s your mother today?”

  “Comfortable,” Don replied. “She’s been singing along with songs from the sixties again.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “Does she need anything?” Her caring blue eyes and that wonderfully lilting Welsh accent always made Don feel better about this whole sad ordeal.

  “I don’t think so, but thanks. I’m just going to get some coffee, and I’ll stay until eight.”

  “Right you are, m’love,” the veteran nurse said, and gave Don’s burly forearm a comforting squeeze before setting off on her rounds.

  The atmosphere at St. Cuthbert’s was pleasant and carefully maintained. Most of the conversations were hushed and private. Doors were closed quietly, and sometimes it felt as much like a small town public library as a hospice. Don reminded himself that this was not the emergency room or even a conventional hospital. No one would be rushed in for treatment and few resuscitation attempts would ever be made. This place, he knew full well, would be the final stop on his mother’s long journey.

  He took a sip from his cup. The machine in reception produced a highly caffeinated, dark-brown liquid that brazenly masqueraded as coffee. It would keep him awake, at least. Don sat in the reception area for a few minutes. A woman about his own age sat opposite him, her fingers quietly drumming on the leather handbag in her lap. She wore sunglasses and was dressed expensively enough to stand out.

  “Waiting for someone?” Don asked, pleasantly. “A ride?”

  She nodded. “My husband. We’ve been here all day.” It had not, quite clearly, been an easy one.

  “You’ll be ready to get home, I imagine,” he said.

  “As soon as he’s finished the paperwork.” She glanced around, but there was still no sign of her spouse. “It’s mad that they don’t allow smoking in here,” she said, her fingers continuing their drumming. “I mean, it’s not as if…” She left the thought unsaid. “I’m sorry.”

  Don was always wary of asking personal questions, but he wanted to think about something other than his own impending loss. “Is it one of your parents?” he asked. “I mean, who you’re visiting?”

  “My father-in-law. He passed this morning.” She stated it as a fact, with little obvious emotion.

  “I’m sorry,” Don said. There was an awkward silence. He sipped from the brown plastic cup of coffee and asked, “Had he been ill for long?”

  “Alzheimer’s,” the woman said, the single word summing up a decade of struggle and sadness. “A blessing, in the end. You know?”

  Don nodded. “My mother is here. Bone cancer,” he said, the words feeling harsh and unwelcome as always, “but her dementia has become a lot more advanced recently. Doesn’t remember anything from the last few years.”

  “But her memories from fifty years ago are clear as a bell, right?” the woman speculated.

  “Right,” Don said. “She can still sing all the old song lyrics, but she forgets where she is.

  Don couldn’t make out the woman’s eyes behind the sunglasses, but her body language seemed vaguely sympathetic. A moment later, her husband arrived, looking red-eyed and pale. “Okay, dear. We’ve done everything we need to,” he said, his tired whisper only adding to the subdued atmosphere. The woman stood and graciously shook Don’s hand before leaving.

  He finished the dreadful coffee before it could cool any further and returned to his mother’s room. She was snoozing, but the armchair squeaked as he sat, and she woke. She looked at him, blinking over and over. “Don!” she grinned. “My sweet boy. Where did you come from?”

  He was learning to let these comments go. “How was your nap, Mum?” he asked, taking her hand again.

  “You know,” she said, “I wish your father could be here. He’s so busy.” Susannah shook her head slightly. “Busy, busy, busy.”

  Again, Don held his tongue. He could have reminded his mother that his real father had walked out on them over forty-five years before, but he knew she meant that self-serving old crook, Sir Thomas Hughes, her second husband, the man she had insisted he call “Father.”

  “He was such a good sailor,” Susannah said, out of nowhere.

  “Yes, Mum,” Don said. He was used to these non sequiturs, part of a fragmented commentary on the home movies playing in his mother’s ailing mind. Three weeks ago, she was still remembering recent events, but now, the only memories that surfaced were those from her earlier life, the seventies and before. It would not be much longer before she would forget who Don was completely. The thought made him shiver.

  “The Gypsy Dancer,” Susannah recalled. “Thirty-six feet long. Our home for two wonderful weeks.”

  “Where did you go, Mum?” Don asked. The nurses said that it was good to keep her talking during these more lucid moments.

  “All over,” she said with a gleeful little laugh. “Mexico and Jamaica, lots of l
ittle reefs and inlets. Two weeks and then back to San Marcos.” She sighed and her eyes grew misty. “We were inseparable back then. Before everything.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DON FROWNED. HIS mother seldom mentioned her relationship with Sir Thomas Hughes. Their marriage had deteriorated badly enough to prompt a serious nervous breakdown in Susannah back when Don was a teenager. He had barely spoken to the industrialist again after Thomas’s decision to commit his wife to an “in-patient care facility.” Don had known immediately what the place truly was: somewhere for the broken-minded to be kept safe and for a small minority of fortunate patients, nursed back to health. In his mother’s case, the bumbling of the doctors and the grim, hopeless atmosphere had made her mental state worse. Susannah had attempted two disastrous spates of “care in the community,” and after that, made her home at Kerry Hill for nearly forty years, right up until her final transfer to St. Cuthbert’s.

  “What was it like before everything, Mum?” Don asked.

  “He was always busy, busy, busy,” she said again. “Meetings and traveling and managing his factories. You know,” she continued, “he built four factories from nothing.” She held up four pale, slender fingers. “Just like that!” she marveled. “Thousands of people. All depending on him. Busy, busy, busy.”

  Don decided that silence was the most prudent option. He had never felt anything but hatred for Thomas Hughes. Not only had the man condemned his mother to an asylum, but he’d also wrecked Don’s life. As an angry, sidelined stepson, he was banished to the care of his elderly, uneducated maternal grandparents when his mother was hospitalized. They could barely read. Life with them had been tedious and limited. He had felt like a burden.

  Hughes had granted Don a stipend, but it dwindled to a pittance that ensured that he would have no college degree, nor any of the world adventures that were Susannah’s dearest wish for her son. Instead, his adolescence unfurled in a fug of cigarette smoke, beer fumes, and betting slips.

  Now, Don held his mother’s hand and let her carry on, her hoarse little whisper almost painful to hear, but it was far better than what would come later. Don dreaded even the idea of that final silence and pushed the thought away every time.

  “Sometimes he wouldn’t get up from his desk until two or three in the morning,” Susannah was saying. She tapped Don’s hand with deliberate fingertips. “Writing and thinking and planning. Hardly ever had time for me. Busy, busy, busy. I wish he’d come to see me,” she said again.

  Don didn’t remind his mother that Sir Thomas had succumbed to a heart attack seven years before. Instead, he reached for something positive to say. “You were good to him, Mum. A good wife.” Hughes had had a busy, complex life, and Don knew that his mother had tried her best to be a good partner through the eight difficult years they were together.

  She had been a gentle, sweet, kind person, and Don, while he didn’t know for sure, always believed that Sir Thomas had done something to anger her, some transgression or lie that served to corrode her already fragile mind to the point where it snapped. On his darkest days, Don imagined Sir Thomas tormenting her, berating her, forcing her closer to the edge, and then calling for the “men in the white coats” once he’d finally tired of her despairing, tearful complaints.

  “I used to watch him, you know,” Susannah said after a pause. Her blue eyes twinkled a little now, framed by neatly combed, soft white locks.

  “Watch him?” Don asked, at a loss once more.

  “At his desk. That lovely antique desk he bought himself when his third factory opened. He used to sit there,” she told Don, “until two or three in the morning.”

  “Yes, Mum,” Don sighed. “You said.”

  “He loved reading that letter.” She paused and turned to her son with an earnest expression. “You know, don’t you? Thomas read it over and over,” Susannah recalled, “but always in secret. He made me promise.”

  “Promise what, Mum?” Don said. “What did the letter say?”

  “It was beautifully written,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard the question. “Thomas was so proud to receive it. He never cared about all the terrible things people said. There was a photo of the three of us on the beach. Summer of seventy-two, it was. I wanted to put it up on the mantel, but Thomas said I couldn’t. Oh, the color of the water.” Her eyes glazed over once more. “I adored that shimmering blue. Always so warm.” She sighed. “So warm.”

  Don was racing to catch up, fearful that this moment of lucidity and revelation would pass all too quickly. “Where were you, Mum?” he asked.

  But his mother was hazy-eyed, dwelling in her own memories. “Long, lazy days,” she recalled with a sigh. “Just the three of us and his servants. They caught big, tropical fish off the stern and grilled them for us on the deck.”

  Servants? “Who was the third person in the photo, Mum? Where were you?”

  Susannah shook off the daydream and frowned at Don as though he’d forgotten his own name. “San Marcos, silly!” she said. “He was so charming. And so very handsome in his uniform. ‘A strong and wise man,’ your father used to say. Thomas always hid that letter in its own little box inside his desk. Secret, secret, secret.” She trailed off, her eyes beginning to close again.

  Don was desperate to know more. Who was the wealthy, uniformed individual she was talking about? And what was so very secret?

  “Mum, listen to me. Tell me about the letter.”

  Her eyes opened just a fraction. “Hmm?” she said, her voice tiny and plaintive.

  “The letter, Mum,” he said, more loudly. “Tell me about the letter. Who was it from?“ But Susannah was sinking back into sleep.

  Don stared at his mother for a long moment, hoping she might jolt back to wakefulness. He knew she would have no memory of this fragmented conversation when she woke up. He took out his cellphone and quickly wrote himself a note, including the details he could remember. It all seemed important, although he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why.

  Nurse Watkins appeared at the door just as he was returning the phone to his pocket. She looked kindly at Susannah and moved to pull the covers up over the frail woman’s shoulders a little more. “Has she been talking much?” the nurse asked quietly.

  “Yes, a little,” Don said. “But just fragments. Bits and pieces. I’ve been trying to make sense of it, but…”

  The nurse nodded. “It’s nearly eight, m’love, and you’ve been here all day. Why not get some rest? She’s in good hands.”

  Don rubbed his eyes and gave the nurse a grateful smile. “She is,” he agreed. “The best.” He kissed his mother’s forehead once more, and then he turned down the bedside lights before leaving her room.

  As he walked across the rain-soaked parking lot to his battered old VW, as he drove home down the quiet A282, and for the rest of the evening, Don English thought about Sir Thomas Hughes and his writing desk. “Who was that other person, Mum?” he asked the walls of his basement apartment. There was no reply, but still he asked the most pressing of questions: “Why did this letter have to remain so secret?” Unable to sleep, Don went for a walk just after midnight, his scuffed brown shoes splashing slightly in the puddles. “Secret, secret, secret.”

  Back at home, he set his alarm for the next morning but then sat in his old armchair in the living room, sipping a glass of cheap whisky. He finally went to bed sometime after two o’clock, drained by events and bothered by his mother’s cryptic reminiscences.

  His phone woke him just after four. “Mr. English? It’s Nurse Watkins.”

  He was bolt upright in seconds. “What’s happened?” he asked, but he knew the answer, even before the nurse’s kindly, Welsh voice confirmed it.

  “I’m so sorry, m’love. It was just ten minutes ago. She slipped away in her sleep.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE WALK FROM the White House Inn to the library was a good deal further than Laura anticipated. As she passed along the cobbled streets, she mused over the idea o
f purchasing a small car. Arriving with minutes to spare, she took a deep breath and walked inside. She found herself in a spacious building that seemed larger on the inside than she had expected. The distribution desk was in front of her, to her left. She readied a pleasant smile and approached.

  “Erm, hello,” she said to the librarian, a petite woman with dark hair whose name badge read “Nat.” She was slightly older than Laura. “I’m Laura Beecham.”

  “Oh, hi!” Nat replied. “Welcome to Gorey. Hang on a sec.” Nat set down the pile of books she was holding and lifted the counter so Laura could walk through. “I’m Nguyen Ling Phuong, head librarian,” she said, shaking hands.

  “It’s very nice to meet you, Miss… um, sorry, what was your…?”

  “Please don’t worry. Everyone calls me ‘Nat.’ Much easier. I’m from Vietnam originally.”

  “Nice to meet you, Nat,” Laura smiled, a little relieved.

  “Have you just arrived on the island?”

  Laura nodded. “Just yesterday. All a bit of a rush, but I love what I’ve seen of the place so far.”

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The weather’s pretty good, by British standards anyway, and there’s always something to do,” Nat enthused. “I’ve been here for six years, and I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

  “That’s great to hear. It’s certainly a big change from London,” Laura said.

  “London? Oooh, London’s too big! I grew up in a village. Two hundred people. Gorey is perfect for me. Come on, I’ll show you around.”

  The library was a single large room with thick, old beams supporting its sloping roof. The rectangular distribution desk was nearest the door, with racks of CDs on the wall to the right and the interlibrary loans to the left. Past the distribution desk were four computer stations, and behind those, six reading desks sat at the center of the room between rows of very tall wooden shelves full of books. Half a dozen readers were sitting at the tables, while others browsed the neatly arranged collection; sections labeled “New Acquisitions” and “Nat’s Recommendations” stood against the left and right walls. DI Graham was right. It was a solid, fit-for-purpose library, one that any town the size of Gorey could be proud of.