Evergreen Falls

by Kimberley Freeman

  I turned to the staff register, careful not to soil it with the peanut butter from my toast. I knew the dates I was looking for, and was delighted to find that an Armstrong, V had commenced work as a waitress in the autumn of 1926. My excitement built as I searched but failed to find anyone else with the initial V—it must have been her. And there was something unusual about her entries in the register: her name stopped appearing in July of that year, with no explanation. With other terminated employees, the register would include a date of termination and a reason (and some of the reasons were intriguing in themselves: “caught smoking for fifth time,” “too dull-witted,” “left to pursue the man who got her in trouble”). But in Violet Armstrong’s case, her name simply stopped appearing. She was paid her usual salary at the end of July, and after that . . . she disappeared from the record.

  I finished my breakfast and turned to the library record, to see if a collection of letters from 1926 had been catalogued. It hadn’t. Curious.

  I stuck Violet to my fridge with magnets, next to my photo of Adam and Anton. All my mysteries collected conveniently in one place. I was considering them when my phone rang. Tomas.

  “Hello?”

  “It was lovely to have a message from you. Why can’t you sleep?”

  “Now I’m too excited. Guess what I found?” I told him everything with growing pride that I had solved the mystery (well, mostly) while he was away.

  “So, they had a brief affair but never married? No happily ever after?” Tomas said.

  “Not according to the book I read at the library yesterday. He was dead the following year, and she . . . I don’t know. There’s no record of what happened to her, but she stopped working at the Evergreen Spa that winter. Oh, and Tomas, she was so pretty. I’m going to take a photo and message it to you. I have one of Samuel and Flora, too.”

  “You’ve done amazing things. Well done.”

  “I have a few last parts of the mystery to solve.” I told him about the missing correspondence from that year. “I suppose I don’t really need it now to identify Violet, but it would be interesting to read it all the same.”

  “You know, I seem to remember from when I first went into the west wing on my walk-through that an office off the foyer had some books and papers that the librarian missed. Perhaps you could check in there.”

  “I will.”

  “You can wait for me to get back if you like.”

  My heart stopped. “Really? You’re coming back?”

  “Sabrina’s cousins are here now, and some friends she works with. She’s showing signs of improvement every day. I don’t think I need to be here anymore.”

  “Don’t you want to be there when she wakes up?”

  “I’d love to be,” he chuckled, “but my employer expects me back at work as soon as I can be. Delays cost them a lot of money.”

  I was secretly grateful that such practical matters could bring him back to me soon. “So, when . . . ?”

  “I’ll be back next week.”

  Next week. It was already Tuesday. Nearly Wednesday. “I will be really glad to see you,” I said, boldly.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “You never call me or send me messages. I had started to think you’d gone off me.”

  I blushed, despite the thousands of kilometers between us. “I didn’t realize I could,” I said, honestly. “I’m really not very good at this stuff.”

  “Third date,” he said. “Next week.”

  “I can’t wait,” I replied.

  * * *

  I dropped in on Lizzie on my way to work, to tell her that Tomas was on his way home. But she didn’t answer her door, and it wasn’t until I arrived at work half an hour later that I discovered why.

  “Hey,” Penny said. “How is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Tait,” she replied, her face echoing my confusion.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She went into hospital. I thought you must have known. It happened on the weekend.”

  I felt like my blood dropped two degrees; people going into hospital was one of my least favorite things. “Hospital? Is she okay? I mean, obviously she’s not okay if she’s in hospital but—”

  “I’m not sure, that’s why I was asking you. She’s at the private clinic at the bottom of Arthur Street, apparently. One of the nurses mentioned it.”

  I looked anxiously at the clock. I was rostered on all day.

  “It’s okay, go if you need to. I can manage. Eleanor’s coming in soon.”

  “Would you mind?” I asked, already untying my apron. “I wonder if she’s lonely. Frightened.”

  “Go,” she said. “See you tomorrow. Hopefully with good news.”

  I raced off, just in time to catch the local bus that rumbled down the main road. It dropped me off at the Anzac Park, and I walked through it to reach the back of the private clinic. The gray clouds still hovered, but it hadn’t yet rained.

  After checking in at the reception desk, I was directed down the pale-pink-and-green corridor. My dread lifted a little. This was a lovely clinic: it smelled like roses instead of disinfectant. Adam had never been in a hospital that smelled like roses.

  I found her lying on her side, turned towards the window. The television was on, but the sound was down. I thought she might be asleep, so I hesitated in the doorway, but then she moved and I could hear her humming softly to herself. She had an IV line in her hand, a big bruise on her crepe-like skin.

  “Lizzie?”

  She turned, then when she recognized me the corners of her mouth turned up slightly. “Hello, dear. How nice of you to come.”

  I slid into the padded chair next to her bed. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. Besides, I don’t have your number.”

  I was pretty sure this was a lie. She had all my contact details because she was my landlady. “Have you called anyone else? Your kids?”

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing, really. Just a little operation and it’ll all be over, they say.”

  “Operation?” The calming effect of the roses wore off and was suddenly replaced by concern. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s a problem with my lower intestine. I’ve had it before. I always knew a day would come when I’d wind up in here about to be carved up. Really, I’d rather not talk about my guts. It’s very undignified, don’t you think?”

  “So, you were raced off to hospital and you didn’t tell me? I could have come with you in the ambulance.”

  “I caught a taxi, dear. I wasn’t worried. Nor should you be, and certainly not my children.”

  “You’re not getting rid of me,” I said. “I’m going to call your children. You may as well just tell me where I can find their phone numbers.”

  She sighed. “My house key is in the bag in that drawer there. If you’d water the plants, too, I’d be most grateful. Their numbers are all pinned to the wall next to the phone. In case of . . . emergency. Call Robbie—he’s the eldest and the bossiest. He can tell the others.”

  I reached for her hand. It was very cool, and her fingertips very smooth.

  “Gosh, I hate this,” she said. “What’s the point of me? What’s the use of being as old as I am? I’ll disrupt everybody’s lives, and for no good reason. I’ll either be fine or I won’t. Life goes on.”

  “When’s the operation?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. They keep changing their minds. I thought it was tomorrow, but now they’re saying Friday. They say my condition has to stabilize first. It might even be next week.”

  Next week. “Tomas will be back next week,” I said.

  She smiled, the first genuine smile she’d given me today. “Lovely. You’ll need to get your brows seen to again. They’re getting pale.”

  I laughed. “He’s going to find out sooner or later my true eyebrow color.”

  “Put it off as long as you can.”

  * * *

 
I don’t know what I expected of Lizzie’s son. The way she’d spoken about her children, I’d feared he might be dismissive, maybe even hostile. But, in fact, Robbie was a soft-voiced man who spoke to me with gentle gratitude. Two hours after I’d made the call, he phoned back to say they were all on their way from their various locations in the world, and to ask me if I’d keep Lizzie company as much as I could until they got there, which of course I promised I would.

  * * *

  Four days of lunch shifts were followed by four long visits at the hospital with Lizzie, who remained in good spirits though she occasionally fell into her negative spells about how inconvenient it all was for everyone and how the doctors had put off the operation again. But I could tell she was grateful for the company, and the fact that her children were coming.

  On the fifth day, her daughters Christie and Genevieve arrived from New York and Vancouver respectively. I embarrassed myself by asking if they’d caught the same plane, to which they smiled in a puzzled way before one of them (Christie, I think) explained that Vancouver was all the way over the other side of the continent from New York, and actually in a different country.

  As I have said repeatedly, my knowledge of the outside world was fairly limited.

  So, I had a whole day to wait for Tomas to arrive, and no shifts at the café. I boldly let myself in to the west wing during daylight hours.

  I checked and double-checked that there was nobody looking when I unlocked the front door, and propped it open with a loose brick. Cracks of light shone above and below the boards over the windows, illuminating a polished floorboard here, a grimy windowsill there. The dusty smell of the place had become pleasant to me, wrapped up in memories of my exciting discoveries. I stood in the foyer looking at three doors lined up, and presumed these must be the offices of which Tomas had spoken.

  The first two rooms were small and empty, but the third was a spacious office with an old, beautifully carved desk pushed up under the boarded window. Opposite the door was another door, which opened onto a cupboard with six shelves. Tomas was right: there were still books and papers in the cupboard.

  I sat my torch on the desk to give me a little light, but then I grew bold. The board over the lower part of the window was loose at its top corner, where the nail had come free. I put both my hands on the loose corner and pulled. With a heave, all the other corners detached with a crack, and light flooded in. Through the grimy glass I could see the line of pines outside, and gray swirling clouds. The desk was thick with dust. I drew a swirly pattern in it with my index finger, then immediately regretted it as I was overcome by sneezes.

  Back to the cupboard. I was daunted by the sheer volume of papers in here. It was so much easier up in the library, where everything was catalogued. I immediately dismissed the thought of going through all the boxes and piles: right now all I was looking for was a leather-bound letter book, like the ones for 1925 and 1927. While rain moved overhead I worked in the dim, dusty light, carefully moving piles of papers and stacking them around me in a semi-organized fashion, trying not to hurry. Some I glanced at, and found they were mostly supplier records listing food and linen and washing powder and so on, bought in bulk. I found Eugenia Zander’s address book, and of course I skimmed through the H entries for Honeychurch-Black, but it wasn’t there.

  Perhaps it was curious or perhaps it was random, but the letter book I wanted was the last thing I found. It was beneath everything, inside a box, sandwiched between invoice books. The rational part of me said that it was probably flung there long after Eugenia Zander’s time, by somebody who neither knew nor cared what it was. The excitable part of me said that it was hidden: well, semi-hidden. That Eugenia Zander deliberately made it hard to find, though her passion for record keeping meant she couldn’t dispose of it altogether. In my vivid re-creation of the events of 1926, Violet Armstrong went missing and Samuel Honeychurch-Black actually died of a broken heart.

  I knew, of course, that I’d be disappointed at some stage. Real life was a lot less exciting than that.

  At the precise moment that I pulled the 1926 letter book from the file box, I heard the front door of the west wing open.

  I wish I could describe precisely the reaction my body went through at that sound. At first, a faint hope that it was Tomas. Then, remembering I had his key, the awful realization it was someone else, someone I didn’t know. Then, glancing around and seeing the enormous mess I’d made of this room, a room I wasn’t meant to be in, inside a hotel I also wasn’t meant to be in, a feeling of dread. Piles of papers and books, a board ripped off a window, and in my hand an old leather-bound journal that belonged in a library. At this last thought, I stuffed the journal in my shoulder bag and pushed it down under my spare scarf. Now my heart beat even more guiltily as I tried to think of an appropriate pose to adopt for my inevitable discovery. I settled for at least looking like I was putting everything back. So my back was turned when the voice said, “What are you doing here?”

  I turned around and—because I’d seen it on police shows—put my hands in the air.

  The security guard, an incredibly buff man in his fifties with a thick handlebar mustache, burst into laughter. He gestured that I should lower my hands. I think I smiled or maybe I grimaced.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Lauren Beck.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out Tomas’s key. “I have a key.”

  He switched off his torch and looked around at the papers and boxes. “Are you working with the librarian?”

  I almost nodded. Perhaps I should have. But I didn’t trust my ability to lie. “No. Tomas Lindegaard gave me his key for safekeeping while he was away. I came in to look through some old records. I’ll put everything back.”

  He frowned, held out his hand. “You’d better give me that key. Not that I don’t trust you, Miss Beck, but . . . well, no, I don’t trust you. I don’t know who you are, and I do know that Tomas Lindegaard is in Denmark—”

  “Tomas will be back tomorrow,” I said, dropping the key into his palm. “You can ask him then.”

  “All right, I’ll do just that. In the meantime, I’ll take down your name, address, and phone number, and escort you out.”

  Oh, the shame. Thankfully, the rain had eased. An elderly couple with a Maltese terrier looked at us curiously as we walked out of the building. I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t obvious I was being evicted—it wasn’t as though I had my hands in cuffs and a gun at my back—but my guilt and embarrassment must have been glowing like a beacon. The security guard led me to his car, where I faithfully gave him my contact details, which involved me proving my identity by fishing out my driver’s license from the bottom of my bag: a tricky operation because—God help me—there was a stolen book in the way. Of course my driver’s licence still listed my old address in Tasmania, and the best person to prove where I lived was Lizzie, who was in hospital. I was about to mention Penny at the café, when the security guard said, “Show me your phone.”

  I handed it to him, and he did something tricky on it and got my number off it somehow, and wrote that down.

  “All right, I have all I need. I’ll talk to Mr. Lindegaard. I’m sorry if I’ve inconvenienced you, Miss Beck, but I’m just doing my job. The insurance wouldn’t cover you if you fell or hurt yourself in there, you understand.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Can I give you a lift home?”

  I shook my head. “I’m really sorry.”

  He shrugged, said good-bye, and got in his car, leaving me standing outside the hotel—locked up now, no way of getting back in—wondering if Tomas was going to be pleased or angry with me. As if on cue, the rain started again. I walked home.

  * * *

  I was so ashamed that I couldn’t bring myself to look at the letter book straightaway. I left it in my bag and lay in the bath for a long time. When I finally emerged, I checked my phone and saw a message from a number I didn’t recognize. I immediately thought of
Anton Fournier and played it back.

  “Hello, Lauren. It’s Terri-Anne Dewhurst here responding to your message. Could you call me at your earliest convenience? I’m very keen to talk to you.” Her voice was quiet, almost girlish.

  I quickly toweled off and threw on my pajamas, even though it was only four p.m., then grabbed the letters from Samuel to Violet and called her back.

  She answered on the first ring.

  “Thanks for calling me back so quickly,” she said. “I’ve just had your e-mail forwarded on to me, and I have to say I’m very excited.”

  “I have the letters right here,” I said. “I should warn you, I guess, that they are very . . . um . . . sexy.”

  “Really? Brilliant! I’d be more than grateful if you could send them to me. I can’t believe you found them. Are you sure they’re written by Sam?”

  “Sam? Is that what they called him? Not Samuel?”

  She laughed lightly. “You know how there’s an amateur genealogist in every family? That’s me. And yes, Great-Uncle Sam has intrigued me for years. That’s how I’ve always thought of him because that’s how my grandmother, his sister, referred to him. When she spoke of him, that is.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s him. I’ve been investigating old guest registers, and the facts check out.” I thought of being caught out today and shuddered with embarrassment again, but then I told her everything I knew. About Violet, about the portrait, everything. “I’ve become quite caught up in the mystery of it, I confess,” I told her. “I was hoping you might know more. What happened to Violet? I know Sam died of pneumonia the following year, but—”