The Legacy: Trouble Comes Disguised As Family (Unspoken Book 2)

by T. A. Belshaw

  Jess threw on a thin, cotton dressing gown and hurried down the stairs. Greeting her with a hug on the doorstep she said hello to Alec, the driver of the van, and led the way to the lounge where the hospital bed was stripped and ready for removal.

  As Gwen carried a pile of bedsheets out to the van, Alec and his son took hold of the special mattress that helped reduce pressure sores and, twisting it onto its side, lugged it across the room.

  ‘I can see you lads have done this before,’ said Jess.

  ‘Too many times,’ replied Alec with a grunt. His son had turned a little too early as he stepped into the hall.

  Gwen stood aside as the two men came out of the front door with the mattress.

  ‘We’re going to try to get the bed out in one go,’ Alec said, grumpily. ‘We’ll be here all day if we have to strip it down to parts. I’ve got a darts match at twelve-thirty.’

  Gwen hurried back inside and picked up a pile of pillows. Jess, looking guilty, felt the need to explain why she wasn’t helping.

  ‘I’m not really dressed for it. I’ve only got a short nightie on under this.’ She opened her arms to show her unfastened dressing gown. ‘I can’t find the belt.’ Too late, she realised that Alec and his son had re-entered the room.

  ‘Well, that was worth coming for at least.’ Alec winked at her as he passed.

  The bed was easier to get out than they had thought it might be, and with a bit of manoeuvring and only a couple of scrapes on the doorframe of the lounge, they soon had it loaded onto the van.

  ‘There’s a massage mattress topper too,’ said Gwen. ‘It’s rolled up in the cupboard under the stairs. Alice didn’t like it. She said it made her feel funny.’

  Alec snorted with laughter and opened the door to the cubby under the stairs. Dragging out what looked like a rolled up li-lo, he stuck it under his arm and stood looking at Jess as though expecting a tip.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ said Jess with a smile. She squeezed past him and stood by the open front door with her fingers on the handle.

  Alec grunted, and mumbled something about it being a wasted day off as he carried the massage mattress out to the van.

  Jess felt the weight of Gwen’s hand on her arm and turned towards her. ‘Never mind him, Lovely. His mother will be grateful for the bed, as will I. She’s a big woman. The electronic risers on the bed should stop me putting my back out.’

  ‘Would you like a coffee before you go, Gwen? It’s ages since we had a chat.’

  ‘Oh, go on then.’ Gwen smiled and shouted out of the door towards the two men. ‘I’ll be over in half an hour, just get it set up in your mum’s lounge. I’ll need you to give me a hand to move her from her old bed to this one though, so don’t clear off too early.’

  ‘I’ve got darts,’ Alec moaned as he climbed into the van.

  ‘Darts are more important than your mother’s welfare?’ Gwen pulled a fake smile and waved them off. Jess closed the door, then letting her dressing gown fall open, walked through to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

  ‘The room looks empty without the bed it in,’ she said, as she brought the coffee mugs through to the lounge.

  ‘I know, it seems to have been there forever,’ Gwen replied, taking one of the mugs and sitting down on the lumpy sofa. She fidgeted for a while, trying to get comfortable. ‘This sofa has seen better days.’

  ‘I’ve got a new one coming,’ said Jess. ‘It is being made as I speak.’ She winked at Gwen. ‘I’ve got a new kitchen coming too in a few weeks. She hurried back to the kitchen and returned with the brochure.

  ‘Ooh, I say. We’ll hardly recognise the place.’

  ‘It needs doing,’ replied Jess. ‘There’s woodworm in the cupboards.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that you shouldn’t,’ said Gwen. She looked around the lounge. ‘Alice was always saying the place needed a makeover. She was just too old to be bothered with it.’ The carer smiled at an old memory. “Jessica will know what to do with it. She has good taste.” That’s what she told me.’

  Jess smiled sadly. ‘I do miss her so, Gwen.’

  ‘Me too, my lovely. But…’ she looked up at the ceiling. ‘She’ll be around if you need her for anything.’

  Jess swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded.

  ‘How did the family take the news? About the will, I mean. I assume Alice didn’t change her mind during those last few days.’

  ‘She didn’t, and they didn’t take it well at all, Gwen. Grandma Martha and Marjorie took it particularly badly. They really thought they had landed on their feet when they heard they’d been mentioned in the will.’ Jess finished her coffee and taking Gwen’s empty mug from her, she placed them on the coffee table before sitting down again. ‘Grandma’s face could have curdled fresh milk. She’s spoken of nothing else since. She’s convinced I can just conjure up money out of thin air.’

  ‘She wasn’t concerned enough to come and see her mother when she was ill,’ replied Gwen, who had heard all about the family feud from Alice.

  ‘My dad was the worst though. He was a bit scary to be honest.’

  ‘Owen? So, he’s back is he? Word spreads fast.’

  ‘He calls himself Bill these days. He was worried about bumping into the Duncan brothers. He’s owed them money for years. That’s why he ran away originally.’

  ‘Does your mum know he’s back?’

  Jess nodded. ‘She was the one that told him about the family dinner I organised. She was so pleased to see him but he treated her like dirt, just like he always has.’ Jess’s lips became a thin line. ‘Still, things are going to get a bit better for her soon. The trust owns a cottage that will soon be empty. I’m going to let her have it.’

  ‘That’s lovely, Jessica,’ replied Gwen. ‘I’m sure it will help to get over her problems with… Well, you know?’

  ‘I hope so, Gwen. I really do.’

  Gwen suddenly looked unsure of herself. She wrung her hands on her lap, looked across at Jess, then quickly back down at her chest.

  ‘I, erm… You know when you asked about those missing pages from Alice’s memoir and I said I didn’t know what had happened to them? Well, I do know. I’m sorry I lied, but Alice made me promise I wouldn’t tell you what was in them.’ She took a deep breath and let the air out slowly. ‘I’m still not sure I should talk about it, but as it’s you, and you have the rest of the memoirs…’

  ‘Don’t feel you have to tell me if it’s going to be on your conscience, Gwen. It’s just that… well, I really do want to know everything there is to know about her. She’s my hero and when I write my book, she’s going to be the star of it, albeit with a different identity.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll forgive me when we finally meet up,’ said Gwen, looking heavenwards again.

  ‘Wait a minute, let me make us another cup of coffee. You won’t have had lunch yet either. Can I make you a sandwich?’

  Gwen looked at her watch. ‘Oh my, I’m supposed to be back to supervise Old Alice’s bed changeover. I completely forgot.’

  Jess got to her feet and rushed to the hall. ‘Give me five minutes to get changed, I’ll nip you over there, then I’ll give you a lift back and you can tell me all about Nana while we have lunch. How does that sound?’

  ‘It sounds perfect,’ said Gwen. She picked up her phone and rang Alec’s number.

  An hour later, Jess and Gwen sat at the big oak table in the kitchen and tucked into a plate of cheese and onion sandwiches. Gwen smiled fondly as she picked one up.

  ‘Alice would have thrown this back at me,’ she said with a little laugh. ‘Ham was her thing. She thought she’d been short changed if I ever made her a sandwich without meat. She loved her mustard too. The strong, yellow, English stuff. “Don’t ever try to feed me any of that insipid, French sludge,” she used to say.’

  Jess smiled at Gwen’s anecdote. ‘I can see her saying it.’

  Gwen sipped at her coffee and put the half-eaten sandwich back onto her plate.

/>   ‘Now, about those missing pages.’

  ‘Do you still have them?’ asked Jess.

  ‘No, Lovely. She asked me to burn them, unread, and I did as I was asked. I threw them into my wood burner at home.’

  ‘But what was so terrible about them, Gwen? Nana had a very troubled life back then, I’m not going to go into detail, but if she thought what was in those pages would upset me, then it must have been truly awful.’

  ‘Not awful in a nasty sense,’ replied Gwen. ‘She didn’t kill someone, or anything like that. The thing is… well, she suffered from a period of depression.’

  ‘Depression… and she had to hide that from me? I’d have understood, especially knowing what she went though.’

  ‘She said it was a period of severe Melancholy. That’s what they used to call it back then. She wouldn’t see a doctor about it, she was terrified that he might book her into the Funny Farm… her words, not mine, Jessica.’

  ‘Oh, Nana, you silly thing. There was no need to hide it from me.’

  ‘It was classed as a weakness when she had it. Even doctors would tell you to snap yourself out of it. Anyway. This is what happened.’

  Gwen took another sip of coffee and stared into the distance.

  ‘It was a day or two before she died. You remember she had to have the antibiotics for that awful chest infection? You had brought down the two books she’d asked for from the attic, and she handed one to you, then put the other one in her bedside drawer.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jess. ‘She said I didn’t need to see that one yet.’

  ‘Well, after you had gone home, she called me in and asked me to get the book from the drawer. When I pulled it out, she told me to sit down and flick through the pages until I got to June, then I was to turn back one page and tear out all the sheets before that one. I asked her why, but she just gave me that look of hers, there was no point in arguing, so I tore them out and handed them over. She stared down at them for a full five minutes with an anguished look on her face as though she was remembering the events she’d written about. Then she told me to get one of the large brown envelopes from the kitchen drawer. When I got back, she had folded the pages in half. She handed them to me and ordered me to put the sheets directly into the envelope without looking at them. I did as I was told, I sealed it, then she took my hand and made me promise to burn it as soon as I could. I had to swear on my husband’s life that I wouldn’t open it. Then she let go of my hand and said, “Jessica must never be allowed to read it.” No one in my family can ever know I was on the verge of being locked away for ever in the lunatic asylum.’

  Gwen looked out of the back window as she thought.

  ‘They couldn’t do that, could they?’ I asked.

  ‘Alice lay back on her pillows and looked at the ceiling. “Gwen,” she said, “they could do anything back then. At one time, a woman suffering with the baby blues, could be sent there. In Victorian times, a man could have a woman committed for infidelity, claiming she must be mad to have done it. That had stopped by the time I got Melancholia, but anyone with severe depression was pretty much considered to be insane and were shipped off to the nuthouse without so much as a by your leave.”

  ‘She said, “I couldn’t let that happen. What would have happened to the farm? To Martha? They would have put her in an orphanage.”’ Gwen looked at Jessica through teary eyes. ‘The poor woman.’

  ‘I’m so angry about this, even though it was a different time with different standards,’ said Jess, putting her hand on Gwen’s.

  ‘The main reason she didn’t want you to read it was because she had recorded all of her suicidal thoughts. She didn’t want to put you through the anguish of reading them. She said that she was in a really bad way, mentally, and she had sat in the bathroom with a little pot of the barbiturates her doctor had given her when she had complained about not being able to sleep properly. Somehow, she got through without overdosing on them. She said it was probably the thought of her prize boars, Horace and Hector being shot that stopped her taking them… and Martha of course. Anyway, by the summer, she began to feel a little better. She put it down to the lighter nights and mornings but there must have been more to it than that.’

  Jess thought about Alice, at eighteen, pregnant, frightened and alone. There was no support in those days. Women were stigmatised and thought of as being wanton. On top of all that, Alice had been left with the huge responsibility of running the farm after her father had drunk himself to death. Jess took a deep breath and let the air out in a huge sigh.

  ‘Poor Nana, she was under so much pressure.’

  Gwen nodded. ‘She said I deserved an explanation after asking me to burn the papers. Then, as I said, she made me promise not to talk about it. She still felt such a strong sense of shame. She was so proud of being seen as a strong woman in a time when all women were considered to be inferior to men.’

  She looked up at the wall clock and gasped. ‘Is that the time? I’d better get home. Gareth will be wondering where I am. He’ll be hungry.’

  ‘Can’t he get his own dinner for once?’ asked Jess with more anger in her voice than she meant.

  ‘No, he’ll burn the place down, Lovely. It’s not that he won’t do it, more that he can’t.’

  ‘Nice excuse if you can get away with it.’ Jess wasn’t convinced.

  ‘He does other stuff, Jessica, things I can’t do around the place. And he runs all the errands, does the bins, decorating, that sort of thing. There are a lot worse, believe me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Gwen.’ The two women got to their feet and hugged. ‘I’m not mad at your Gareth. I’m still stung by Nana’s confession about her mental state. I wish she felt she could have shared it with me.’

  ‘Pride, my dear. Don’t think bad of her. She kept her secrets right to the end, but it was to protect you, as well as her own reputation.’

  Jess led Gwen back through the front room, reaching for her bag as she went.

  ‘There’s no need to put yourself out, Lovely. I can walk this time.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Gwen. You’ve done me two big favours today.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I’ll tell you what. Do you think your Gareth could do without you for one night? I’d love you to stay over. We could have some wine, watch a little TV and have a proper chat about Nana. I’ll get a new bed for one of the spare rooms. Please say yes.’

  ‘I’d love to, that sounds like a really good idea, just give me a call when you can fit me in. I’m usually off on a Saturday night.’

  ‘I’m having a housewarming party soon. You and your Gareth have an official invite to that too.’

  Gwen blushed. ‘Ooh, I say. A party. We don’t get invited to many of those.’

  ‘Well, you’re top of my list for this one,’ said Jess. She gave Gwen another hug and followed her out to the car, pulling the door shut behind her.

  When she returned, twenty minutes later, she parked up the car and was just about to walk to the front door when the old bed and mattress she had left out for the council caught her eye. The plastic covering had been stripped from both the mattress and bed. The plastic bags of old bedding had been torn open and the bed had been made as though it was still in use. Jess opened the metal tube gate, pushed it open and pulled back the duvet to find two, small, straw, scarecrow-like figures lying pressed together underneath. On the front of each head, was a childlike drawing of a face, held in place with a thick elastic band. Between the two heads lay a sheet of paper onto which had been drawn a large heart. Written in thick marker across it, was a single word. US.

  Chapter 23

  ‘Someone did what?’

  ‘Hang on, I took a pic, I’ll send it to you, Sam.’

  Jess sent the picture of the made-up bed to their joint WhatsApp group.

  ‘That’s just creepy,’ Sam said after a few moments. ‘No need to guess who did it, is there? Have you phoned the police yet?’

  ‘Not yet. But I am getting a little bit concern
ed. Calvin was hanging around the farm the night I moved in and someone… I can’t say it was him… someone scratched a deep gauge down the side of Bradley’s beautiful old car when it was parked outside.’

  ‘Call the cops,’ said Sam, firmly.

  ‘I might just have a word with him first. I know he was a control freak but this doesn’t seem like him somehow.’

  ‘For pity’s sake, Jess. This is seriously weird. Promise me you’ll ring the police.’

  ‘I’m not sure, Sam. I want to know it’s definitely him before I accuse him of anything.’ Jess heard her best friend sigh.

  ‘Well at least get a security camera up on the wall so you can see who’s ferreting about. Tell me you’ll do that at least.’

  Jess could visualise Sam’s frustrated face. ‘I’ll do that… Actually, I know just the man. He’s an electronics technician.’

  ‘So was Calvin. Be careful, they might be a type. You know, Technocreep Incorporated.’

  Jess laughed. ‘This one is a broadband installer, though he’s a contractor and does all sorts of other stuff. He left me his card.’

  ‘Ring him as soon as you hang up this call,’ Sam demanded. ‘You need that camera up, ASAP.’

  Jess rummaged in the drawer under the coffee table and pulled out Wade’s business card.

  ‘I’ll ring him now. He’s a bit of an oddball. He asked me out when he’d finished installing the broadband line.’

  ‘He what? You don’t half attract them, Jess. Listen, Missis, go to that electronics repair shop in town. At least he has a bricks and mortar business.’

  ‘Bits and Bytes? The man who runs it is Calvin’s mate,’ replied Jess. ‘I’ll go there if I have to, but only as a last resort.’

  ‘Do you want me to come over and stay for a few nights while you get your security sorted?’

  ‘That’s kind of you, Sam, but there’s no need. I’ll be fine, honestly.’

  ‘Well, the offer stands. All you have to do is call.’