An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  He smiled at her and said, “You don’t have to ask every day, you know. I know you’re only being polite. This must be quite upsetting for you.”

  “I’m actually quite interested. You go off every day to some wonderful office. I don’t even know what you do. Thanks.” She accepted a bowl of mashed potatoes from her aunt.

  Her uncle made no reply, and for some minutes they ate in silence, the sound of utensils on dishes resonating in the silent room. “Good stew,” he said finally. His wife got up and began to clear the plates, and Erin started to rise to help. Her uncle reached over and put his hand on her arm, and she sat back down. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and the scar she had always known, but never understood, made a great ridge along his arm.

  “Listen, kiddo. We don’t mind having you here. We like it, if the truth be known. It’s like having Ben around again. But where’s it all going? Will you go home after the court case? You’re going to have to face up to them sooner or later. Besides, what you did was awful. I don’t think you can have any conception of how dangerous it could have been.”

  Erin hung her head at this. After her outburst of fury when she’d been caught, she’d seen right away how dangerous it could have been. She’d seen it in the eyes of the night watchman who found her, jamming the axe into the mechanism of the saw. It terrified her now to think of how she had not recognized herself in that moment. Her silence to her parents, the police, and probably even the judge, whom she would be seeing in a little under two weeks, had come out of this abject terror about suddenly not knowing herself at all. She realized how dangerous what she had done would have been to some mill worker if she had not been caught.

  What she could not understand was what could be wrong with her, and it frightened her. “I do know, Uncle G. I do understand.”

  “Then why did you do it?” He was leaning toward her, talking quietly, as if he didn’t want his wife, clattering in the kitchen, to hear.

  Erin’s hands were on her lap, clenched together. She could feel her tears coming. “I don’t know! I don’t know, okay?” she whispered. Her uncle put his hand out palm up, and she put hers into it.

  “Is it the fella?” His uncanny jump made her look up.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. Is it the fella? Your mother said you haven’t been the same since you got engaged.”

  She wiped her eyes furiously. “No one needs to worry about that anymore. I’m unengaged now. Obviously no self-respecting boy wants to be married to a crazy vandal. Maybe I’ll return to ‘normal’ now. Whatever that is.”

  Her uncle smiled. “Did I ever tell you how I met Mother?” He lifted his chin toward the kitchen. “I met her in the hospital. She sewed me up.” He held up his scarred arm. “She was an intern at the hospital. The only woman.”

  Erin turned, amazed, to look into the kitchen. How was it possible she had never known this? Ida was her father’s sister. Why had he never said anything? Her aunt was putting teacups on a tray. She looked at her uncle, perplexed. “Why isn’t she a doctor now? Isn’t that what you become after you’ve been an intern?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Something was rising in Erin. She could feel its darkness pushing at her. “I mean, why is she in there all day ironing napkins and making pot roast. I mean, why isn’t she at the hospital helping people?”

  “We got married,” he said, simply. “Obviously she wasn’t going to work.” He chuckled. “She always said she wished she’d been born sooner so she could have worked in France during the Great War. Wouldn’t have got her for my wife then, so it all turned out for the best.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “WHAT DO WE THINK WE have then, Inspector?” Gilly stood over the skeleton he had carefully reconstructed. Badly deteriorated shards of earthy cloth and a gold locket sat on a nearby shelf.

  Darling stood with his hands in his pockets, his mouth set in a thoughtful line. “You tell me. Isn’t that why the department hires you at enormous expense? Did you find anything else on the remains?”

  “These scraps of threads and fabric . . . a grey wool blanket, I’d say. I can tell you that this child was buried at least twenty years ago, and I shouldn’t be surprised if it were more.”

  “The cellar was rebuilt in 1910. Could it be from then?” Darling asked.

  “Yes, I’d say. Could be any age from ten to even as old as sixteen. Damage makes it difficult to tell the sex, but I’d be willing to commit to the child having been malnourished early in life.”

  Darling moved closer and looked with interest at the remains. “We thought because of the locket it might be a girl.”

  Gilly shrugged. “Not necessarily. If you were to ask what killed him or her, it’s hard to say. Some crushed ribs suggest something. She might have fallen under something and asphyxiated, or the ribs might have been crushed postmortem by the weight of the soil when she was buried. There is also evidence of a blow of some sort to the skull, but the location in the central occipital area, and the fact that the fracture is almost invisible, does not necessarily suggest a blow hard enough to cause death. Oddly, there is evidence of a break of the right wrist that happened at some point in early life and then healed over. It looks like it was splinted properly, so there is evidence of some care taken of the child.”

  Darling gazed at the remains, trying to sort the dissonance created by the idea that the child had possibly been well cared for at some point, yet buried unceremoniously over the Hughes’ cellar with a cracked skull and broken ribs. Not entirely unceremoniously, though. The child had been laid face down, her arms tucked under her, and the locket around her neck. “It suggests a child who was regularly knocked about by her . . . someone?” Darling asked.

  “No, I’m going to say possibly not. In those cases we often see evidence of serial damage on the frame. Aside from the broken wrist, I’d say this damage happened all at once. I’m not, as I said, sure that the blow to the head could have killed her, but we can’t rule it out. She was small for her age and malnourished in early life. Perhaps she was just fragile. I’m puzzled that the locket was left, or who knows, even put, around her neck. If you’ve killed a child and are hastily getting rid of the evidence, don’t you take anything of value?”

  “Then why isn’t she buried in the King Cove’s cemetery? I’ll set Ames to looking at the locket. He’s trying to track down any evidence of missing children in the last say, thirty years.”

  “I should include the last thirty-five years, just to be safe. She could have been buried there when the place was first renovated or anytime thereafter up to say, ten years ago,” suggested Gilly, beginning to wash his hands in the sink.

  As if manifested at the mere mention of his name, Ames appeared at the door, looking uncharacteristically troubled. “Sir, you know that girl you arrested? She seems to have run away. Her parents are in the waiting area. You’d better come.”

  “Wonderful,” Darling said. He turned back to Gilly. “Let me know if you have any other insights.” He felt uncommonly gloomy after his conversation with Gilly. Having a living child now missing was not likely to improve his mood.

  Back in his office, Darling sat next to Ames, facing Mr. and Mrs. Landy, who contrary to his expectations seemed unable or unwilling to speak, now that they had presented themselves. “Can you tell me what happened?” he asked, looking from one to the other. The mother of the girl was wearing a dull, pale brown jacket and olive-coloured hat that seemed to render her skin ashen, and her eyes were red. The total effect was one of a woman who, of no great age herself, had nevertheless lost the battle with life. It was the father who answered. He’d been sitting on the edge of his chair, holding his hat, his lips set grimly.

  “We had her at my sister’s. She seemed fine. Went to school, came home, did her homework, ate a good meal, helped with the dishes. Seemed to have learned her lesson, especially as she is having to go to court. But she’s buggered off. I told you, you should have kept her in the clink.”r />
  At this his wife looked up with disapproval. “What he means is,” she began, and was interrupted by his waving his hat at her to be quiet.

  “I think I’m quite clear about what I mean. The night before last she snuck out of the house and has not come home. She did not go to school, and she is not, before you ask, with her fiancé, Paul Hedley. He doesn’t seem to have a clue where she’s gone. In fact, I like the kid, but I’m beginning to think he doesn’t have a clue, period. She’s doing this to spite us.” At this Mr. Landy sat back in his chair, as if waiting to have this bewildering behaviour explained to him by the police.

  “Why have you waited till now to report this?”

  Mrs. Landy looked accusingly at her husband, who sighed and looked away. “He thought she would get scared and come running back,” she said acerbically. “He thought it would teach her a lesson. He didn’t think anything could happen to her out there.”

  Darling thought it best to stay out of the way of this full-fledged marital dispute. “Have you spoken with her friends?”

  “Yes, and no, she is not with them.”

  “What did she take with her?” Ames asked. He had been making notes and had his pencil poised above his black notebook.

  At this the father frowned and looked at his wife. She wiped her nose with a handkerchief she had retrieved from her handbag. “I asked Ida, my sister-in-law, about that. Erin did pack up all the clothes we’d sent her with, but she left her suitcase in the bedroom. All she took were some books and a sweater of her uncle’s. It usually hangs in the hall. He puts it on when he comes home from work. I’m frightened, Inspector. It’s not like her. She has no experience of the world. Anything could happen to her out there alone.”

  “Not like her?” her husband spluttered, glaring at her. “Nothing is like her anymore. It’s your fault, filling her head with ideas.”

  Darling listened to them with a sinking dismay. His idea of the most foreign creature in the world was a teenage girl, and this one was intelligent and fractious. Of course they had dealt with runaway girls before. They ran away with their boyfriends, or to the safety of a friend’s. Some of them had good reason to run, but he somehow suspected that these parents were no threat to their daughter. In fact, they seemed as helpless and unable to understand their teenage daughter as he was. He remembered Lane’s surprise at the girl being expected to marry. Was she protesting her parents’ plans for her?

  Ames suddenly spoke. “Do you remember the last big argument you had? I have a sister, and she used to be a real firebrand. Argued with our parents all the time over everything. She was always threatening to run away.”

  At this Mr. Landy looked at his wife. She glanced nervously at him and then turned to Ames. “We don’t really argue. She clams up when we try to talk to her. She just goes in her room with some book. We’ve tried to tell her she’s too . . . well, bookish, I suppose. I mean, the things she wants to do are completely unsuitable. And I don’t know why you think I fill her head with ideas. It’s that sister of yours,” she added, turning to her husband.

  “What sort of things does she want to do?” Darling asked, hoping this might yield a clue about where she’d gone.

  “She wants to go to some university in Montreal to study science,” Mr. Landy said, cutting off his wife, who was about to speak. “I mean, can you imagine? Science? It’s ridiculous. So what does the wife do? Says she can go out to the coast when she finishes high school, take a secretarial course. I’ll tell you right now, she’s not going to any coast, she is going to stay put and get married. She’s got a good young fellow. Works hard. He’ll be running that mill before too long. Of course, he won’t go near her with a ten-foot pole after this! My own sister was training to be a doctor. I don’t know why my parents allowed that sort of nonsense. My brother-in-law soon put a stop to that. That’s why she needs to get married. I was counting on that young man to do the right thing. Now I’m not so sure about him. He’s weak, like so many of them these days.”

  It was going to be futile to talk to these people about a world where women were doctors and flew planes, and went on dangerous missions to enemy territory, for that matter. The war, which had so transformed the world outside this valley, seemed to hardly have had an impact on attitudes. Women, who had taken on so many jobs when the men mobilized, were being hastily pushed back into homemaking when the men returned. Resentment lingered wherever men found women hanging on to jobs they thought should be theirs. If I were a girl, he thought, I would leave.

  “Are you going to do anything or not?” Landy said.

  “We will alert the RCMP detachments in the local towns and talk to local transport to see that she hasn’t gone on a bus or train somewhere. You must contact us the minute you hear anything. Did your sister indicate any reason she might have left? An argument, anything?”

  “Nothing. That’s why we put Erin there. They always got along. My sister and her husband have one kid, Ben, and he’s grown and gone off to Toronto, you see. They said they’d like to have a young person around again. My brother-in-law said she seemed happy there, and I thought he would talk some sense into her.”

  “Does she have any money, do you know?”

  “Not that I know of. We give her a small allowance, but she doesn’t work. I doubt my sister would give her anything like enough to buy a train ticket,” Mr. Landy said.

  “MY GOD, AMES, what a family!” Darling said, when the Landys had left, only barely satisfied with the proposed plan. He was seated at his desk, with his chair swivelled around to face the window. “What did you make of them?”

  “It’s surprising they waited two days to tell us. They’re a tad old-fashioned, sir. My sister is at the university in Vancouver, getting a PHD in sociology. She was always smarter than me. My parents never raised an objection to it. I think they were proud of her. Gave us all a bit of peace and quiet when she went off to the coast. I hope this Landy girl didn’t try to hitchhike.”

  “Well, we could use some good social working now. Did your sister ever run away, by the bye?”

  “No, it was all bluster. I think she just liked the idea that she thought she could. Anyway, I was her little brother. She didn’t want to leave me.”

  “How sweet. If you were my little brother, I’d leave you without a moment’s hesitation. As it is I’m stuck with you. How are you getting on with the search for missing children?”

  “Gone back sixteen years, sir, and so far nothing that would fit, missing girl–wise.”

  “Well, you’ll have to start again. Gilly says it could either be a girl or a boy. Any age up to sixteen, and small for his or her age. And he suggests you go further back, up to thirty-five years.”

  Ames sighed in a resigned manner. “Very good, sir.” He turned to go.

  “Not so fast. We have a live child on the lam. The dead one can wait. Run along and phone the RCMP, and check to see if anyone of her description took an early train today. I can’t see why even that unstable girl would climb for no reason out a window with her little all to escape from the clutches of some relatives she got along with.”

  “We don’t know she actually climbed out the window, sir.”

  “When you’ve done that, stop by the newspaper office and let them know we’ve found a small child’s skeleton out at King’s Cove, foul play suspected. See if it scares anything out of the bushes. Then we’ll go visit the boyfriend and then the aunt and uncle.” And then, he thought, I will have to telephone Miss Winslow to let her know we are looking for someone up to the age of sixteen, of small stature. The thought of hearing her warm, resonant voice on the other end of the line lifted his spirits no end.

  PAUL HEDLEY WORKED at Sutter’s Mill situated four miles off the main road to Slocan, about a twenty-minute drive from Nelson. Darling and Ames pulled up and parked near several cars and small trucks. An unnervingly high pile of stripped logs dominated the yard, and Darling skirted it at a respectful distance. A local man had been killed three years bef
ore when one of these structures had disintegrated and crushed him. The noise of the barking and sawing operations made conversation impossible, but they saw a man who appeared to be supervising the operation and approached him.

  The man leaned in to hear what Ames was saying and then signalled for them to move away from the milling. “What’s that? My hearing isn’t the best,” he said.

  “I said, we’re looking for Paul Hedley,” Ames repeated.

  “Yeah, he’s here. Who are you?”

  Ames took out his card and showed it.

  “He in trouble?”

  “Not in the least. We just need to talk to him,” Darling said, showing his card in turn.

  Paul Hedley, a sandy-haired young man with what Darling thought was an intelligent face, removed homemade earplugs made of wadded cloth and ran a hand through his hair, dislodging sawdust. “You’re here about Erin,” he said. They were sitting at a wooden picnic table around the back of the mill, where the noise was muffled by the distance and the wall. “Her parents called on me before I came out to work.”

  “Do you know where she is?” Darling asked.

  Hedley put his head in his hands and sighed. “This whole thing is such a mess! I do know where she is, if you must know. I couldn’t tell her parents, because . . . I don’t know why, actually. Because they’d think the worst, I suppose.”

  “I don’t know what ‘worst’ you have in mind, but having your daughter go missing in the middle of the night is the worst for parents. She’s been missing for two days. You might think about that.”

  “I know, I know. I got rattled. My dad was looking on and giving me the evil eye, thinking I must have something to do with it. I’ve got enough problems without stirring up that hornet’s nest.”

  “It sounds like you do have something to do with it,” Darling observed.

  “I know she’s in trouble over the other thing, but when she told me she was going to run away, hitchhike to the coast, I panicked. I tried telling her to just get through it, but she’s got a mind of her own. So I suggested she go to our secret place. It’s a summer cottage along the lake just past Balfour. We found it last fall and we’ve been going ever since. The door wasn’t locked or anything. Anyway, I drove her there and she made me leave and promise not to tell anyone. My loyalty is exemplary,” he added disgustedly. “But it was better than thinking of her in the hands of some truck driver in the middle of nowhere. I know her. She would have gone if I hadn’t helped her.”