A bucket of ashes

by P. B. Ryan

  “War is an even more unpleasant pastime and I had recalled,” he said dryly. “And, too, I’ve been on the move for over two weeks, in less than luxurious circumstances. Getting to Calais was a trial all by itself, and that packet was a rusted-out old bucket, barely seaworthy. I’d never been seasick in my life till that crossing.”

  “Falconwood is the perfect place to rejuvenate yourself,” Viola told him. “You must stay here with us till you’ve got your bearings.”

  “I must admit,” he said, “I was counting on just such an invitation. It might be best, however, if I took up residence in the boathouse, as I did when I was young.” It was to avoid the inevitable altercations with Mr. Hewitt that Will used to stay alone in the boathouse during family summers on the Cape. And he once told Nell he that found the lapping of the water restful.

  “Of course,” Viola said. “I’ll have a bed made up for you there. Stay as long as you need to. We’ll be leaving at the end of the month, but you’re welcome to remain here if you like.”

  “We shall see,” he said with a glance at Nell.

  “Mrs. Waters must have known you were coming,” his mother told him. “She’s making wild duck with onion sauce for supper.”

  “It’s probably best if I take my meals in the kitchen, as I used to,” he said. “Less familial drama to spoil everyone’s appetites.”

  “Your father is going to be here for the rest of the month,” Viola said. “I hate to think of you eating all your meals alone.”

  “I’ll eat with him!” Gracie said. “Can I, Miseeny? I mean, may I?”

  Nell looked to Will, who said, “I’d be delighted to have the company.”

  “Very well—but young ladies who’ve been playing fetch with dogs must wash up and put on clean frocks before they eat.” Nell stood and reached for Gracie’s hand.

  “I’ll see to it,” said Viola as she wheeled over to the door, which Will held open for her. “Come along, Gracie. You, too, Clancy.”

  Nell, Will, and Cyril sat in awkward silence for a few moments, until Nell said, “Will is an expert in forensics, Cyril. I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned that.”

  “You have, yes,” Cyril said. “A fascinating specialty, Hewitt.”

  “I think so,” Will said.

  “The Falmouth coroner could use someone like you,” Nell said. “He’s got a real quack doing postmortems for him.”

  “Nell’s brother died under suspicious circumstances,” Cyril told Will. He explained about Jamie’s fugitive status, the fire, the slapdash autopsy, and the uselessness of the Falmouth constabulary.

  “The first thing that’s needed,” Will said, “if one really wants to get to the bottom of this, is a competent autopsy.”

  “But he’s already been buried,” Nell said.

  “Bodies can be exhumed,” Will said, “and as Jamie’s next of kin, yours would be the only permission required. His having been embalmed is all for the good. Not that I’d be too deft with the scalpel right now.”

  “I could handle that end of it,” Cyril told him. “Of course, I wouldn’t mind if you were there to lend your expertise.”

  “Are you seriously suggesting this?” Nell asked.

  “If it would put your mind at ease, why not?” Will asked. “Unless you find the notion of disturbing your brother’s remains too troubling to—”

  “What I find troubling,” she said, “is suspecting that Jamie’s been murdered, but not being able to prove it. If you two are willing to conduct a proper postmortem, then yes, I would very much appreciate it. I also wouldn’t mind going to the farm where he died and speaking to this Claire Gilmartin and her mother. I’d like to find out if anyone knew Jamie was there, or if any strangers had been seen lurking about.”

  “Today is Saturday,” Cyril said. “You won’t be able to apply for the exhumation till Monday. You’ll have to go to the Falmouth Town Hall for that. I’d do it for you, but I have appointments all day, and besides, they’ll probably need your signature on the application.”

  Will told her that he would accompany her to Falmouth Monday morning, and then to the Gilmartin farm. When dinner was announced, he took his leave and went out back to the boathouse with his satchel and traveling case.

  Cyril held the front door open for Nell. As she was passing by him, he stilled her with a hand on her arm and said quietly, “I want you to know that my offer of marriage still stands.”

  * * *

  That night, after the rest of the household was asleep, Nell buttoned her wrapper over her night shift and stole out of the house on slippered feet through the French doors in the dining room. She sprinted down the back porch steps and across the lawn to the boathouse, through which lamplight glowed in the windows.

  The second floor guest suite was accessed through an exterior stone staircase. This she climbed, knocking at the door on the landing. There was no answer. She knocked again, harder. Upon hearing no movement from within, she turned the doorknob, finding it unlocked.

  The sitting room that formed the core of the suite was spacious and warmly decorated, with a great deal of leather and polished wood. To the right was a little kitchen, to the left, the stairwell that led upstairs to the turret and downstairs to the boat slips. Straight ahead was the closed door to the bedroom, which was where she assumed Will was, although she couldn’t imagine why he’d gone to bed with a lamp lit in the sitting room.

  She knocked softly on the bedroom door, waited a moment, and slowly opened it. By the light of a single candle on the dressing table, she saw that the big four-poster bed was not only unoccupied, but tidily made up. The French doors that let out onto the veranda overlooking the bay stood open, but the veranda itself was small enough that Nell could see he wasn’t there. From the darkness outside came the rhythmic slapping of waves against the shore.

  Will’s open satchel sat on the dressing table alongside a stack of journals and books and the Wedgwood perfume tray that Viola kept there for guests. The tray held a roll of cotton wool, a teacup, several little bottles, and a flat, rectangular brass case.

  Nell stared at the tray from across the room, her scalp prickling. With a sense of dread, she crossed to the dressing table, lifted a square-sided cobalt blue bottle, and read its label by the shuddering candlelight.

  Carbolic Acid

  Poison

  8 oz.

  A smaller, unlabeled bottle was half filled with a clear solution. Next to it was a little vial with a handwritten label that contained a white powder.

  Sulfate de Morphine

  1 gramme

  “Oh, God.” Nell lifted the teacup to peer inside, instantly recognizing the tarlike smell of carbolic, of which there was about half an inch in the bottom, with a hypodermic needle soaking in it for purposes of sterilization. She knew what was in the brass case, but she opened it anyway. Snugged into specially shaped niches in its red velveteen lining were a steel-and-glass syringe and three of the four needles that belonged there.

  “Damn you, Will.” She snapped the case shut, her heart like a chunk of lead in her chest.

  He doesn’t seem to be able to resist the lure of Morpheus for very long. Whenever he’s feeling out of sorts, he goes right back to it.

  Will had made light of what he’d been through—War is an even more unpleasant pastime than I had recalled—but it would seem his experience in France and the grueling journey home had taken a toll on his state of mind.

  Through the open glass doors, Nell saw a tiny flame ignite briefly in the darkness, then wink out. Stepping out onto the veranda and peering into the nearly moonless night, she could just make out the dock extending into the bay, and the raised platform at the end of it. As she watched, there came a minuscule orange glow, as of a cigarette being drawn on. Will rarely smoked anymore, only when he was feeling ill at ease.

  Nell left the boathouse using the front staircase rather than the rear one connecting the veranda to the dock, so that Will wouldn’t see her. She stood at the bottom of t
he steps for a minute, her arms wrapped around herself although it was a balmy night. Turning, she walked around the side of the boathouse and down the dock. As she neared the platform, she could make out the two wicker rocking chairs turned toward the water. Will’s head was visible above the fan-shaped back of the chair on the left; in his right hand, draped over the side of the chair, the cigarette still glowed.

  He didn’t hear her until she stepped up onto the platform, and then he turned and saw her. He stood, hurling his cigarette into the bay, and strode up to her, lifting her off her feet as he took her in his arms. His mouth closed over hers for a hot, sweet, lingering kiss that robbed her of her breath, her thoughts, her qualms. He was in his shirtsleeves, the warmth of his body through the thin linen making her heart race. The joy she felt to be holding him again, after agonizing over his fate for twelve long days, was pure and all-consuming.

  He set her on her feet, his arms still banded around her. “I want to make love to you.” She realized his morphine consumption must not be as high as it had been back in ‘sixty-eight, if he’d retained his sexual appetite; that was something.

  “Will...”

  “Just tonight,” he said, nuzzling her hair. “And I swear I’ll try to back away after that. I don’t want to make things difficult for you, I just—”

  “It isn’t that.” Tell him about the baby. Tell him you’re trying to get a divorce. It was what she’d come here for.

  Until she’d seen that little vial of morphine, those malevolently glinting needles.

  “Then let me take you inside,” he murmured into her hair as he started unbuttoning her wrapper. “Let me—”

  “Not here,” she said. “Not with your family so close.”

  “They’re three hundred yards away, fast asleep behind closed doors.”

  “I just... I... I...”

  “Shh, it’s all right,” he said, pushing the buttons back into their holes. “I’m sorry, Nell. I’m being a selfish cad. You’re grieving for your brother, and all I can think about is...” He kissed her hair and stepped back. “God, I’m just so happy to see you again. “

  “Me, too.”

  “Sit with me?” he said, indicating the rocking chairs.

  “Of course.”

  Will held her chair for her, then pulled his close to hers and sat, both of them facing the water, which was all but invisible. From the corner of her eye, she could see his sharply carved profile, his heavy-lidded eyes.

  Presently he said, “There’s no sound quite as soothing as the rhythm of waves against the shore—or the hull of a boat. I miss sailing.”

  “You sail?” He’d never mentioned it.

  “I used to. I used to love it. Have you ever done it?”

  “No.”

  “You’d like it. Being out on the water always felt so... pure, so clean and invigorating. I’d go out for hours, sometimes days.”

  “Days?”

  “It was how I got out of myself, renewed myself. At night, I’d drop anchor and strip down and swim, or sometimes just float on my back and stare at the stars and think about the future. The present and the past... well, there was never any salvaging that, but there always seemed to be such promise just around the next sunrise... But that was before—you know—the war and all that.”

  “You haven’t been sailing since the war?”

  “No time for daydreaming about the future when you’re grappling with the here and now. But you know all about that.” Reaching for her hand, he said, “I truly am sorry about Jamie, Nell. I know how it feels to lose a brother, but at least Robbie and I were always close, and there was some comfort in that. To lose a family member from whom one has been estranged is exceptionally painful, I think, because the emotions are so much more complicated. How long had it been... I’m sorry. I’m an utter clod. You don’t want to talk about—”

  “No, I don’t mind.” Indeed, she’d been wishing all along that he were here to talk to. “The last time I saw Jamie was eleven years ago in the visiting room at the Plymouth House of Corrections. After that, he... well, he seems to have deliberately avoided me. He was probably sick of me telling him what he was doing wrong with his life and how to fix it—especially since I was no paragon of clean living myself. But at least I was discreet. He was utterly reckless, insanely so. I know I must have been tiresome, but he was... he was just a boy. Fifteen years old, brought up in squalor, almost no education. He could barely read and write.”

  “Fifteen. That’s awfully young to be thrown into a prison full of seasoned plug-uglies.”

  “I’m pretty sure that livery hold-up—the crime that put him behind bars—was the first time he’d done anything like that. I always suspected Duncan put him up to it, or that he was doing it to impress Duncan, and of course Duncan didn’t bother to discourage him. It was so sad, because he’d been such a sweet, well-meaning kid. He looked like an angel. He had the most beautiful hair, like spun gold. He’d been born with it, and it never changed. It was always overgrown. I used to have to comb it every time I saw him, but I liked combing it. I’d retie his neck scarf. I’d wet my handkerchief and clean his face.”

  Squeezing her hand, Will said, “It sounds as if you loved him very much.”

  “I always loved him. That never changed, not a bit, not even after he started getting in trouble. I loved him despite the course his life was taking, perhaps even because of it, because he was so luckless and ill-fated. For years, I’ve felt guilty every time I thought about him, because I’ve been blessed with such good fortune, whereas he...”

  “You created your own good fortune, Nell. You endured the same nightmarish childhood as Jamie, but you rose above it, as is your nature.”

  Most people follow the path wherever it leads them, Cyril used to tell her. Others hack their own way through the brush and always seem to end up on higher ground. You’re of the second sort.

  She said, “Jamie may not have had much in the way of backbone, but he wasn’t a bad person. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I didn’t cry at the funeral,” she said. “I didn’t even cry when Cyril told me he’d died. I haven’t yet. I want to, but I just can’t. It’s as if there’s this great black storm cloud inside me, swollen with rain, but the rain just won’t come.”

  “Is it because you hadn’t seen him in so long, do you think?”

  “I suppose so. It just doesn’t feel real. Jamie doesn’t even seem real anymore. He’s like one of those bleary, faraway memories, where you’re not sure if it really happened or you just dreamt it. I didn’t even see his body. Cyril wouldn’t let me, because of... you know. Its condition.”

  “He was right. You wouldn’t have wanted to see your brother like that, Nell.”

  “No, I should have. At least then, this wouldn’t be like some bad dream I just can’t seem to shake off. It would be real. I saw Jamie’s photograph when Cyril took me to speak to the chief constable, but it isn’t the same.”

  “Give it time, Nell. Grief is a complicated thing. The last thing you need right now is to feel guilty because you’re not grieving exactly the way you think you ought to be.”

  She turned her head to smile at him. “I’ve missed this, Will. You’ve always been so easy to talk to.”

  “Most people would disagree with you, I think. I’m very glad you’re not one of them.” He turned her hand over and stroked his thumb across her palm and wrist, sending warm shivers up her arm and into her chest. “So it’s ‘Cyril’ now,” he said quietly.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your Dr. Greaves. You call him Cyril.”

  “He asked me to.”

  “Mm.” He pulled a cigarette case out of his trouser pocket and stared at it, as if trying to decide whether to give in to temptation.

  “I should be going back,” Nell said.

  Will looked as if there was something he wanted to say, or ask, but in the end, he just stood and offered her his hand. He walk
ed her across the lawn and onto the back porch, where he kissed her again, with great tenderness this time.

  “I wish I could sleep with you,” he whispered as he rubbed his cheek against hers. “Just that. Just fall asleep curled up with you between cool sheets, feeling the breeze from the bay through the window, and hearing the sound of the waves.”

  “It sounds like heaven.”

  “Good night, Nell.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Chapter 7

  “They’re out back gettin’ supper started,” said the big, rumpled fellow who opened the front door of Hannah Gilmartin’s farmhouse-cum-boardinghouse late Monday morning. “Chicken soup with dumplings. My mouth’s waterin’ already.”

  Nell and Will followed him through the rambling old house, most walls of which were adorned with at least one crucifix or steel engraving of the Holy Mother. They passed through the kitchen, in which three men were sitting around a big pine table drinking coffee, and out the back door to the barnyard—a patch of packed earth bordered by a gnarled old oak, a peach tree heavy with fruit, a dilapidated barn, and a handful of other small outbuildings. One of them was a chicken coop, judging from the furious squawking and scrabbling emanating from within. Steam rose from a huge copper kettle hanging over a fire pit next to a crude lean-to housing clotheslines and wooden laundry racks.

  “That’s Mrs. G. over there.” Their escort pointed across the yard to a large woman tying a length of cord to a branch of the oak, and retreated back into the house.

  “Mrs. Gilmartin?” said Will as they approached her. “May we have a word with you?”

  Turning, she gave them each a swift head-to-toe appraisal as she finished tying the cord, at the end of which was a little noose. She wasn’t so much obese as burly, a red-faced, sweat-sheened giantess in a headscarf, darkly stained apron, and pigskin gloves. “I don’t rent rooms to couples or females,” she said in a deep-chested voice seasoned with a bit of a brogue. “Or Protestants.”

  “We’re not here to rent a room, ma’am.” Will handed her his card. “I’m William Hewitt, and this is Miss Cornelia Sweeney. Miss Sweeney is the sister of James Murphy, the young man who died when your cranberry shed burned down.”