The three remaining police officers went into motion then, and they walked away in different directions, waving their flashlights around.
“What a goddamned fiasco,” one of them said.
Peter took Estella’s arm, and she managed to stand with his help.
“Let’s get you back,” he said. “It’s wet out here.”
Estella couldn’t get her mind off the tracks and the night she had walked out of the bush. She knew that was a long time ago, but at the same time it seemed to have just happened.
“Should we walk along the beach?” she asked, confused about whom she was with. Maybe it was the porter, but what had he done with his buttoned jacket and cap?
“No,” Peter said. “It’s raining too hard.”
He led her to his truck and she didn’t argue, and by the time they got back to the cottage, she had her senses back and had calmed down. She still couldn’t understand what had happened on the pier, though, and how it had gotten so out of control so quickly. She was worried about Hannah and hoped someone would think to let her know when they had found her.
She put the kettle on and made instant coffee. She told Peter he could go home, she’d be all right, but he wouldn’t leave.
At some point she fell asleep on the couch and dreamed that she and Hannah were sitting on a bench along a trail through the bush. They were holding hands.
“You’re supposed to stay put if you’re lost,” Hannah said in the dream. “We might as well save our energy.”
“You’re wise beyond your years,” Estella said.
The wind blew a gust and spread the tree branches, and they could see the lake. It was such a big lake, but following it would surely lead them somewhere.
“Could we not follow the shoreline?” Estella asked.
Hannah thought for a minute, and then she shook her head.
“Let’s just wait,” she said.
They sat on the bench, catching glimpses of the lake, listening to the leaves rustling, and they waited.
“I don’t know where I am,” Estella said.
“Here’s the thing,” said Hannah. “If you stay put, you’ll always know where you are.”
Estella thought about that until the dream faded.
BY MORNING, THE sky had cleared and the sun was out again. The same female officer came to Emily Carr to tell Estella that Hannah had been found not far from where she’d run off, and was now on her way back to Winnipeg and her mother. She asked Estella a few questions and wrote her answers in a notebook while Peter looked on.
No, Estella said, she’d had no idea that Nicholas had taken the girl without her mother’s consent. They’d driven her car because it had needed a run on the highway. Yes, he was her great-nephew. She didn’t know the wife well.
She didn’t let on that she’d met both of them only days ago, although she supposed the police already knew that.
After the officer left, Peter said that he was going home to his room at The Travellers, but he would be back later to check on her. She went to bed and slept for an hour, and woke up thinking about Hannah’s purse.
She should try to find it for her.
She put her bathing suit on just in case she had to wade into the water to retrieve it. She pulled her shorts and the Lake Claire T-shirt on over her bathing suit, and put on her shoes rather than her sandals because they were better for walking. She took her cane, thinking she ought to be sensible and not risk falling and having to be carried out of the bush again. She sprayed herself with the can of bug spray someone had left on the windowsill, clipped on her sunglasses, grabbed her hat, and felt confident that she had thought of everything.
She took the same path through the trees that Peter had shown her when he was ten years old. She had to watch each step because there were tree roots everywhere. There were flowers blooming along the path, Indian paintbrush and some kind of white anemone. She could smell the evergreens. She kept looking for a bench like the one that had been in her dream, thinking she would rest when she came to it, but there were no benches. She didn’t remember the marina being this far, and she was beginning to wonder if she’d somehow taken the wrong path when she saw the break in the trees ahead that opened to the public beach, and the marina beyond.
She was almost there when she heard footsteps coming rapidly up the path behind her, and she turned with a start. It was Peter Boone, in his running clothes. He stopped when he reached her, barely puffing, which seemed impossible to her, and he said, “Where are you off to?”
“The pier,” she said. “To find Hannah’s purse. It fell into the water last night.”
“Funny, just where I was headed,” he said.
Estella thought he was probably lying.
He fell in behind her, letting her set the pace, and they soon stepped out of the bush and onto the beach. There was a new cement sidewalk between the beach and the road, and they walked along it to the marina because it was easier than walking in sand. When they came to a bench, Estella was glad to sit for a minute, her cane propped between her knees.
“I’ve been wondering,” she said, “if there have been any repercussions about the paddlewheeler last night.”
“None,” Peter said. “Maybe the excitement . . . well, everyone is talking about the other. The fellow who bought her loaded her up this morning. She’s gone.”
The other, he’d said. She wondered if she would ever see Nicholas and Hannah again.
They sat on the bench for a few minutes and then carried on, and as they approached the marina she could see the big empty space where the paddlewheeler had been moored. The concession stand was open and Peter bought them each a cold drink, and then they went to the spot where they thought the purse had gone into the lake. They looked over the edge of the pier and there it was, lying on the bottom in perhaps six feet of clear water. There was no way either of them could wade in and retrieve it.
There were several boys fishing off the pier and Peter commandeered one of them to help. The boy dropped his hook and dragged it along the bottom until he managed to snag the purse and reel it in. Peter handed him five dollars and the boy immediately headed for the concession stand and came back minutes later with a hot dog.
The purse was waterlogged and ruined. Estella got the silver zipper open so she could see if there was anything valuable inside that ought to be dried out, and she found the jewellery bag containing her beads, which she hadn’t known were missing. The wet bag fell apart when she tried to open it. She picked soggy bits of tissue off the beads and checked them for damage, but they all seemed to be intact.
Peter looked at the beads and said they were odd things.
“They belonged to my father’s first wife,” she said.
In that moment, she decided she was truly tired of the burden of Salina, and she wondered whether she had come to the same conclusion the day before and given the beads to Hannah, even though she didn’t remember doing that. She wondered if there was a way she could get them back to her in Winnipeg.
The village taxi pulled up to the pier just then and dropped off a pair of fishermen, and Estella flagged it for a ride back to the cottage. She went by herself while Peter continued on with his run. It was clear, Estella thought, that he was still a good sight younger than she was.
She had no sooner got back to the cottage than Marigold Caige knocked on her door and said there was a phone call for her in the office.
“A woman. I think she said her name was Emmy something,” Marigold said. “Emmy Lou? Emmy Lee? Something like that.”
“Emyflor?” Estella asked.
“Yes, that seems right, Emyflor. She sounds a bit hysterical.”
Estella followed her back to the office wondering what might be wrong, and called Emyflor’s cellphone number.
“Oh my God, Lola,” Emyflor said. “I don’t know what to do. Lydia is here and she’s showing your house to some people who saw it advertised on the Internet. They were in the house when I got here. I don’t know how
they got in. She’s selling your house. Did you want her to sell your house?”
“Selling my house?” Estella said. “No. She can’t sell my house. Put her on the phone.”
She heard Emyflor calling Lydia—“Your auntie is on the phone, she wants to talk to you”—and she heard Lydia saying to Emyflor, “Did you call her? I asked you not to do that,” before she took the phone.
“What the hell are you doing, Lydia? Get those people out of my house right now.”
“Estella,” Lydia said. “I’m doing you a favour. This house is too big for you. Anyway, I’m just seeing what you might get for it.”
“Get them out of the house right now or I’m calling 911.”
She hung up.
Marigold had been listening.
“Everything okay?” she asked cautiously.
Estella pointed to the Caiges’ sign about delighting in insult and difficulty, and said, “I am not at the moment delighted, if that’s what you mean.”
Then she asked Marigold if she had a computer and could find something on the Internet for her. There was a laptop in the office and Marigold did some searching and, sure enough, there was Estella’s house on Kijiji, which Marigold said was like the want ads in the paper used to be, although Estella already suspected that. “Heritage home. For sale by owner.” The price Lydia was asking nearly knocked her over, almost a million dollars. She wondered if she would have a house when she got back, but it was too outrageous to worry about. She would call her lawyer when she got home and he would deal with whatever Lydia had done.
As she was leaving the office, Marigold asked her when she would be checking out. “It’s just, we have your cottage booked for tonight,” she said.
Estella told her she would leave right after lunch.
It wasn’t until she saw her car parked by the deck that she realized she had no one to drive her home. She was stranded.
Then Peter Boone came along again.
He wouldn’t take no for an answer.
* * *
THERE WAS A pounding on the front door, as though whoever was there couldn’t wait for a response to the bell.
“Hold your horses,” Estella shouted as she made her way to the foyer, knowing it was going to be Lydia. Estella looked at her through the latched screen door and said, “Is there something you want?”
“You haven’t been answering the phone.”
“I wonder why,” Estella said.
Peter Boone stood behind her in the hallway. He had her father’s old tool belt strapped on because he had noticed immediately that a windowpane by the back door lock was broken.
“We can’t have that,” he’d said, and he’d gone right to work.
Lydia rattled the screen door when Estella wouldn’t open it for her.
“I want to know who these other Diamonds are you went to the lake with,” she said. “You could have told me.”
“Jack’s grandson,” she said. “Nicholas, from Calgary.”
She was not planning to tell Lydia the rest, how Nicholas Diamond had been taken away in a police car after supposedly abducting his daughter. That had all been sorted. Nicholas had called to tell her that he was back in Calgary, and she’d asked for an address for Hannah so she could send her the beads.
“And what’s he doing here?” Lydia said through the screen, having suddenly realized that the tradesman standing behind Estella was Peter Boone. And then Emyflor appeared in the hallway, too. The smell of lunch was coming from the kitchen, onions and cheese.
“Lola,” Emyflor said, “you want me to wash the sheets today, or maybe wait until next time?”
“Excuse me,” Estella said to Lydia. “As you can see, I’m busy.”
“Let me in, Estella,” Lydia said. Just then one of her heels got caught in a crack in the step. She rescued her shoe and held it up for Estella to see.
Estella looked at the shoe. A chunk of leather had peeled off the heel.
“A shoe repairman can fix that,” she said.
“Open this door right now,” Lydia said, shaking the shoe at Estella.
“Tell me, Lydia,” Estella said, “why would I open the door to a woman who has my house advertised on the Internet? By the way, I’ve spoken with my lawyer and he’s going to be in touch with some kind of cease-and-desist order. Or whatever the legal types call it.”
Lydia bent over to put her shoe back on, and when she stood up again she took a breath and said, “Let me in and I’ll explain.”
“I don’t need you to explain,” Estella said. “You want to know how much my house is worth.”
“You have to move out of the house at some point, Estella,” Lydia said, sounding exasperated.
“I don’t really think I do,” she said.
Then she closed and locked the inside door.
The pounding started up again, and continued for at least five minutes, until it finally stopped and they heard Lydia’s SUV roar off up the street. Once she was sure Lydia was gone Estella opened the front door again to catch the breeze. The house was warm from Emyflor’s baking.
When they sat down to lunch she said to Emyflor, “Remember that term gold digger? You wrote it in your little book. Lydia trying to get my house—that’s what it means.”
After lunch, she asked Emyflor, “Where could I buy a sparkly purse that an eleven-year-old would like?”
Emyflor drove her to a store called Old Navy. They found a shiny black purse with little skulls on it, and Estella remembered what Nicholas had said about Hannah’s night light, and she bought it. When she got home, she put Salina’s beads in a small jewellery bag she had and tucked it into the purse. Then she put the purse inside her watercolour box, along with a letter to Hannah explaining that her red purse had not fared well in the water, and once it was dry it had shrunk so much the zipper would no longer work. She also told her the story of the beads, although not that Salina had stolen them. She said they had been made by a woman artist in England, who had taken a big risk to make them in secret because she was not an actual factory designer and was supposed to be dipping teacups in glaze or some such thing. She wanted to assure Hannah that her parents loved her and that everything would work out, but she changed her mind because there were no guarantees. She ended with, “It might not seem like it, but there are many people who love you.” She underlined the word many.
She signed her letter Estella Diamond and addressed the package to Hannah at her grandparents’ home in Winnipeg. Then she wrapped up the first brick from the Diamond plant and sent it to Nicholas at Bow River Resources. It cost her a fortune to mail the two packages.
A few weeks later, a letter arrived from Hannah. Estella took it out onto her back porch to read. Peter was in the yard, setting up a ladder to trim the runners on the apple tree. He seemed to think you could do that at any time of year. She wasn’t sure that was correct but she didn’t really care about the tree. Her neighbour was right. It had grown too big and shaded the whole yard.
Estella sat in her wicker chair and opened Hannah’s letter. She saw that she had enclosed a new drawing of the spruce tree that hung over the bank at Lake Claire, but this time it had the faces from the beads hidden in its branches, peeping over and under like gnomes in a fairy tale.
She set the drawing aside and read the letter.
Dear Estella Diamond,
Thank you very much for the beads. I will take good care of them. My mother asked why you sent them to me and I told her they were a hundred-year-old heirloom and she said she wondered why they were black instead of that “pretty” Wedgwood blue. I think she missed the point. Please find enclosed my drawing of the faces, which I happen to like a lot. The faces, I mean, although I like the drawing, too. Otherwise I wouldn’t be sending it to you. Thank you also for the watercolour paints, although I don’t yet know how to use them.
Here is what happened, in case you want to know. It was not my dad’s fault. Please don’t blame him. I want to live with him in Calgary. I’m working on it
.
That day we left your house, everything fell apart. The first day, I mean, when we were on our way to Winnipeg. We were all bickering in the car like some terrible family on TV, and Dad finally pulled over onto the shoulder and said he wouldn’t drive until we all agreed to be quiet the rest of the way. When we got there we sat down to dinner and Dad drank too much and got really drunk. After dinner, I went to the kitchen to help with the dishes and I heard Nan say to Mom, “You look so tired, but we’ll look after you, won’t we.”
I wanted to tell Nan, “Mom isn’t the one who needs looking after. It’s Dad. Mom’s the one who went and ruined everything.” But Nan is her mother so I didn’t.
Dad stayed overnight, and then he played with us in the pool all the next day. I knew he was leaving that night, so I snuck into the back seat of his car after they thought Paris and I were asleep. I was on the floor and when he threw his bag in, it almost landed on me. He backed out of the driveway and then we were on the highway again in the dark. He had the radio on an oldies station and was singing along. I was trying to decide when to tell him I was there, when I realized he wasn’t singing anymore. He was crying. Did you ever see your father cry? It’s pretty terrible. I sat up and scared him so that he nearly drove the car into the ditch. He yelled at me that I had almost got us both killed.
All I could say was, “Dad, stop crying.”
He tried to deny that he was crying. I climbed over the console and into the front seat. He was still mad at me. Then he said, “I have to take you back. We can’t start out this way. We have to do it right, your mother and I.” And he said, “Your mother is not to blame. That’s important to remember.”
How was it possible that he didn’t know?
I said I would text Mom and tell her I was all right, I was with Dad and he’d bring me back soon. But that’s not what I texted her. I said that I was going to live with him in Calgary and then I threw my phone out the window.
Dad started the car again and pulled back onto the highway and said maybe we could have a little holiday and check out Lake Claire. In the morning we stopped at a 24-hour pancake place. Dad went to the washroom and when he came back he said he’d dropped his phone in the toilet. I wondered if he’d done it on purpose because we were on the run, at least for a few days.
The Diamond House Page 32