Evergreen Falls

by Kimberley Freeman

“But I did adore my daddy,” she continued. “He never let me down. Not once, not until the day he died. He was meant to pick me up from the train station, and he didn’t come. I’d been away with a friend, and my friend’s family came for her and they offered me a lift, but I said no, Dad will be along . . .” Again the tears. “Gosh, you must think me a silly old duck, crying all over the place.”

  “Not at all. Let me get some tissues.”

  “No, I always have a bumfle,” she said, reaching up her sleeve for a handkerchief.

  “Bumfle?”

  “It’s an old word for the lump a hanky makes in your sleeve,” she said, laughing now. “You’ve never heard it?”

  “No, never. But I’ll use it all the time now.”

  She smiled and now seemed more composed, so I ventured a question. “So, how old were you when he died?”

  “Twenty-five. Mum outlived him by more than forty years, but she never remarried. Couldn’t have met another man as good as him. I met my husband shortly after that, and he did struggle to live up to Dad. It was all a bit of a disaster. We finally divorced once the children had left home. One more thing for Mum to disapprove of. The shame.”

  “There’s no need for shame.”

  She smiled at me. “You are a sweet girl. But I must be getting on with my day and so must you.”

  I saw her off at the door and returned inside, standing for a long while to stare at the photograph. Fifteen years, gone in a blink. Where were Frogsy and Drew now?

  * * *

  My next shift was a lunch shift, and as I cleared plates away I noticed that the big industrial bin outside the west wing was gone. “Have the gardeners finished out there?” I asked Penny.

  She peered out the window. “Seem to have. I thought it had been quiet.”

  On my break I went out and walked the length of the west wing through the newly cleared garden. They’d lopped branches off the pines and cleared decades of needle and leaf fall. The beds had been weeded and the flagstones had been pressure-hosed. On the strip closest to the road, they had laid new turf, and yellow-and-black caution tape kept pedestrians off it so it could settle.

  I came back the same way, glancing at the door to the west wing. They had also renewed the caution tape around the entrance. The flagstones between the two pine trees had been dug up, right down to the clay, presumably to get to the tree roots.

  But the gardeners had gone, and that meant that this evening, after my shift, I could go back in.

  The café was busy for a Tuesday afternoon. Schoolkids and their mums moving tables together to make large groups who wanted impossible-to-remember orders: double-shot latte with soy; strawberry milk shake divided into two plastic cups with straws; hot chocolates that needed to be anything but hot. I was run off my feet, and yet I heard it.

  As I walked past a young woman—overbleached hair, nose ring, sweet face under all that eyeliner—I overheard a snippet of the conversation she was having on her mobile phone. “Yep, sure. Will Aunty Drew be back by then?”

  Aunty Drew. I dragged my feet as my mind began to race. I’d assumed Drew, Adam’s friend, was a man. But of course it was a woman’s name, too. I tried to hang back to hear more of the conversation, but right then a little boy knocked a milk shake all over his school uniform, and I had to rush off to clean it up.

  I was putting the mop away when I saw the young woman get up from her seat and head for the door. Before I knew what I was doing I ran after her and caught her just as she stepped out onto the street.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  She turned, cocked her head curiously.

  “Look, I’m sorry if this sounds . . . creepy. But I overheard you talking about somebody named Drew.”

  She narrowed her eyes. Yeah, I sounded like a crazy person. All that time calling Frombergs and Boggses had done it to me.

  “Do you often listen to customers’ private conversations?” she asked.

  I put my hands in the air. “I know how it sounds, but my brother knew somebody named Drew, here in the mountains fifteen years ago. I’m trying to find anybody who knew him then. Could you just ask her for me? Ask her if she knew Adam Beck? And if she did, and she’s in town—”

  “She’s in London,” the girl said. “Won’t be back until the end of the year. But yeah, she did used to live here fifteen years ago,” she conceded.

  “Would you ask her for me? If she knew him, could you give me a number I can call her on?”

  “Adam Brett,” the girl said.

  “No, Beck. Adam Beck. Here—” I pulled my order pad out of my apron, wrote the name down, and handed it to her.

  “Got it.”

  I watched her go, wondering if I’d ever see her again.

  * * *

  I stayed back late that afternoon, helping Penny restock for the next day. She was anxious to get away on a date with a new man. I offered to finish filling up the cup dispensers and the plastic-spoon holders and emptying the dishwasher so everything was good to go for breakfast.

  It was close to seven o’clock when I locked up, munching on a leftover piece of banana bread that I’d decided would make a nutritious dinner. My legs were tired from the long, hard shift, but it was a pleasant ache that told me I’d been useful and productive in the world. It was raining lightly, and the drops lit up to silver and gold in the beam of the security light over the front door of the café. I kept my head down and walked directly across to the west-wing entrance, and ducked under the caution tape. The bare soil at the entranceway had turned to mud. I reached into my handbag for my torch and shone it about my feet so I didn’t trip on anything as I made my way to the door.

  As I closed the door behind me, the rain intensified, gushing down hard on the windows and roof. With my torch beam to guide me, I made my way down to the storeroom, which Tomas had said I could sort. It smelled musty and damp, and I thought I could hear a drip somewhere up the stairs.

  I stood in the doorway, shining my torch beam slowly from the left side to the right, wondering where to start. Wondering whether to start.

  I began by clearing everything off the table, placing the items neatly in the hallway. Then I opened the boxes and crates one by one, my nose itching madly from the dust. Old teapots and frying pans and rusted kitchen utensils and broken candlesticks. No more letters. At the bottom of every box I would stop and repack everything neatly, then stack the box against the wall to make room for the next one.

  When I’d finished with what was on the table, I started with what was under the table. I nearly pulled my shoulders out of their joints trying to lift what turned out to be an old Singer sewing machine in a wooden case. More boxes and crates. This time I found a stack of postcards—all black-and-white pictures of the hotel and its gardens—and my heart leaped, but none were written on. I kept sorting, finding nothing.

  The rain hammered on outside as I began to grow tired of sorting boxes in the cramped hallways. As I stood and stretched—my back was sore from being hunched over—the sound of the drip grew more pronounced. With my torch shining its beam in front of me, I rounded the storeroom and stopped at the bottom of the stairs. I shone the beam up. Nothing.

  I tested my weight on the first step, then told myself I was being silly: the building had stood here for over a hundred years; it was structurally sound. Still, I held tightly to the tarnished brass rail as I made my way up to the first floor.

  I found myself standing at one end of a long corridor. Bare floorboards. Doors on either side. It must have once been a guest wing. I ran the beam across the ceiling but couldn’t see the drip. I closed my eyes and listened. It seemed to be coming from the closest room to my left.

  I tried the door, and it opened readily. I found myself in a moldy bathroom. The rain was making its way in through the corner, running along the ceiling a little way then dripping on the tiles. A large puddle had formed. I pulled out my phone and took a photo to send Tomas. Then I poked around the bathroom. It was large, with three steps up t
o a platform where a bath must have once stood. All the fittings had been removed, but marks on the wall indicated where they had been, and I tried to imagine the sink, the vanity, the shelves, the mirror.

  I retreated back to the hallway, curious now to see if the rooms were also unlocked. I tried every door but not one of them gave. I tried my key but it didn’t work. It would have been quite easy to pick the lock or force a door, but I didn’t want to do that. Tomas had said everything had been cleaned out of them anyway.

  But now I was at the opposite end of the hallway, and I found myself standing outside a room with French doors, their paint peeling. I shone my torch through and saw books, shelves and shelves of books. I tried the door and found it locked. I rattled the door, and it moved freely and alarmingly. I looked closer and saw that the hinges on one side were completely detached from the doorframe, and the only thing holding the door up was the tongue of the lock. Carefully, I pulled the edge of the door out of the frame, slid through, then leaned it back into place.

  I was standing in a library in a corner of the building. The boarded windows covered two walls, and I imagined how amazing the room must look flooded with natural light and surrounded by views of trees and gardens. What a fabulous place to read.

  Behind the glass doors, the shelves were stocked, and here and there a plastic tag had been placed between books. Three desks—oak by the look of them, with green leather inlays—were placed around the room, and on one of them was a thick modern-looking binder. I sat on the desk and picked it up. A business card stuck to the front of the folder read Gerald Makepeace, Book Historian. Library, Collection and Document Valuation.

  I flipped open the folder. In large capital letters on the first page it read: LIBRARY REPORT AND VALUATION, EVERGREEN SPA HOTEL. The date on the report was only four months ago. From skimming it I figured that the developer hadn’t known what to do with the extensive library when he’d bought the hotel. Neither selling the books off nor throwing them away had seemed an option, so he’d brought in the book historian. The report had recommended the developer keep the books as a significant heritage collection, difficult to sell and more valuable as a “distinctive and integral feature of this historical building.” What followed were pages and pages of tabulation, listing the books and any notes about them. It seemed that the plastic markers were a way of finding particular books now that the historian had organized them.

  I flicked through a few pages, until a subtitle caught my interest.

  Guest registers.

  I ran my finger down the column, my heart ticking a little faster. Only 1912 and 1924 were missing. That meant 1926 would be here—according to the table, in 5A lower drawer. I shone my torch across the books then down. Each bookcase had deep drawers in the bottom. The plastic markers showed me which one was 5A lower drawer. I opened the drawer and took in a second.

  I sat back on my haunches and flipped it open. Guest names had been written in by hand, and the ink was faded and the handwriting was tight and thin. My eyes were going to give out if I kept trying to read by torchlight, so I did something that Tomas might not have wanted me to do: I tucked the 1926 guest register and the bound library report under my arm and took them both home.

  * * *

  God bless electric light. I sat on my couch as the rain cleared overhead, late into the night, and read through the lists of names and dates—hundreds and hundreds of them. Given that the handwriting was almost impossible to understand, my head started aching and my eyes started swimming. I closed my eyes and put my head back, just for a moment.

  When I woke, the rain had set in again, my sitting room light was still on, and my neck was cricked from sleeping at a strange angle. The guest register had slid off my lap and onto the floor, where it lay closed. I hadn’t made a mark of where I’d been up to, and I swore softly at myself.

  I leaned over to pick it up, opened it right in the middle, and scanned the names to see if any seemed familiar so I didn’t have to read them again.

  At the top of the page, I saw his name.

  Mr. Samuel Honeychurch-Black.

  SHB. It had to be. To confirm it, the name directly beneath his read, Miss Flora Honeychurch-Black. His sister, the one he’d mentioned in the letters. I couldn’t contain my smile—not only had I found him, I also knew which room he had slept in, because it was written right here in front of me.

  But it was late now, and far too wet to go back out. I marked the page with a Post-it Note and headed to bed. I sent a text message to Tomas, who wrote back a minute later.

  Well done! Now we have to find her.

  Her. Samuel Honeychurch-Black’s lover. Was she a guest, too? I didn’t have any initials to go on, but I could certainly make a list of women who were at the hotel during his stay. All these thoughts tumbled over in my head as I lay down to sleep. I didn’t get there until nearly dawn.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Because I’d never had a job before, I’d never called in sick before. I was familiar with the concept, having seen it on television sufficient times. But I was unprepared for how guilty I felt, even though I was genuinely sick. Lack of sleep had given me a thumping headache, and I couldn’t face another afternoon shift like yesterday’s.

  Penny, for her part, was sweet and concerned, and offered to drop me in some food on her way home that evening, but I told her not to bother—I was worried I wouldn’t look sick enough when she arrived.

  After I called I went back to sleep for a few hours, and so it happened that I was slouching around in my pajamas at ten o’clock, thinking about making a bowl of cereal to eat on the couch, when there was a knock on my door.

  I put the milk carton down and went to answer it, reminding myself to look weak and pale just in case it was Penny.

  “Dad!”

  “Hello, darling,” he said, folding me in a hug. There wasn’t much of Dad: he was slender and narrow-shouldered, with a full head of gray hair and a gray beard that had grown wispier every time I saw him. He wore his familiar brown corduroy coat and pants that hung loose.

  I stepped aside to let him in. “Mum was supposed to tell you to call me first. I mightn’t have been home.”

  “She told me she’d let you know. Check your phone. Maybe she left a message.”

  Dad was notoriously phone-averse, and I knew what had happened. Mum had wanted him to surprise me. It was her way of checking up on me, making sure I wasn’t doing what I oughtn’t. She knew I wasn’t working mornings this week, so she’d told him to turn up before eleven. But none of this would have been conscious on her part. She had no concept of privacy, especially where I was concerned. She had only a primal urge to keep me safe, and if that meant sending my father in unannounced to make sure I wasn’t climbing a ladder while smoking marijuana and juggling knives, then that’s what she would do.

  “Come and sit down. Can I make you a cup of tea or coffee?”

  “No, just your company, love. Don’t hover. Sit with me. I have a few things to tell you.”

  I sat on the arm of the couch with my feet on the seat, looking at him. “That sounds a bit ominous.”

  He smiled, deep lines traversing his face as he did. I loved it when Dad smiled, partly because it had happened so rarely during those awful years of Adam’s illness. Nor did I ever see him cry. Only once, at the funeral, as though all the years of sadness were finally allowed to emerge. The thought of it caught my heart unexpectedly, and I slid into the seat next to him to give him another hug.

  “You look well,” he said. “Life up here is agreeing with you, I take it.”

  “I have a job,” I said. “That’s new.”

  He patted my knee. “Good for you.”

  “Though I called in sick today. Had a rotten night and woke with a headache.”

  “I have some aspirin in my wallet if you want some,” he said.

  I waved his offer away. “I’ve already taken something. You said you had some things to tell me. Come on, out with it.”

  “Ah
. You’re not to worry, because it’s all fine now.”

  I frowned. “Okay.”

  “But I had a bit of a scare. A . . .” He cleared his throat. “Cancer scare.”

  “Oh, Dad!”

  Both hands went up. “Don’t worry, don’t worry. The biopsy proved negative and . . . it’s all a bit embarrassing. You know. In the waterworks.”

  “I won’t ask any more questions,” I said. “Except, you are definitely fine?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Mum must have freaked out.”

  “She didn’t know.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “How could I tell her, Lauren? She would have died of fright. You know what she’s like.”

  “It’s not her fault. Adam’s illness made her that way.”

  He twisted his lips in a rueful smile. “Actually, she was already a little that way, though you probably don’t remember. She and Adam were always fighting. She thought he should live his life a certain way, and he didn’t always agree.”

  “I can’t believe you managed to keep it from her, though. That must have taken some planning.”

  “Yes, I took care of the whole thing without her knowledge. Specialists, medical procedures, all under the smoke screen of work, conferences, so on. I tell you, I could have an affair and she’d never know.” He laughed at his own joke, but it was a bitter laugh.

  I touched his arm. “I’m sorry you had to go through that alone. You should have told me.”

  “I was even less likely to tell you, sweetie. You have your life to live. I’m acutely aware that your freedom has been a long time coming. Which is why . . . you know I don’t like talking much on the phone. I can’t stand the silences. Your mother’s always there listening. I wanted to come and talk to you alone. When have we ever been alone together?”

  I shrugged. “Almost never.” When Adam got sick, Dad had always functioned more like an accessory to Mum rather than a whole person. After fifteen, I didn’t have the dad memories other people did. I had some from when I was younger—he liked taking me grocery shopping with him, or getting me to time him as he ran up the hill near our house, or showing me how to make batter for corn fritters, always slopping lots of beer in the batter and theatrically cautioning me not to tell Mum.