An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  Lane had given him a list of names and, to the best of her knowledge, where and when they might have lived in the Cove. Darling had agreed with her that the most important to look into immediately were the Chases and the Anscombs, though the youngest Chase girl had died in 1903, which might put her out of the running for their corpse. The surviving sisters might have stayed long enough to remember something else about the families at the Cove. If, as Kenny thought, they had moved into town, they would be easy to track down.

  He found Ames at his usual stool in the diner near the police station, enjoying both his favourite sandwich—ham and cheese—and the attention of a new young woman behind the counter. “Ah, sir,” Ames said cheerfully when his boss slid in next to him. “Nice trip up the lake?”

  Darling ignored him and indicating the attractive brunette, now at the other end of the counter serving a couple of men in coveralls, said, “Haven’t you got enough troubles?”

  “As a matter of fact, she’s engaged. Very nice young woman.”

  “She only said that to keep you at bay. She probably spotted your type the minute you walked in. Or your ex, April, has clued her in.”

  Ames finished his sandwich and noisily slurped the rest of his soft drink up with a straw. “I gather you are in this frivolous mood because you’ve got the girl back.” He wanted to add, “and seen Miss Winslow” but his instinct for self-preservation prevented it.

  “Just a coffee, thanks,” Darling said with a smile to the brunette. “Miss Winslow has been busy and I have some names I want you to track down. They go back to before the Great War, but we might be lucky. One of the families moved back here into town, and the other possibly came out from Manitoba.”

  LANE HADN’T BEEN able to say no to tea, though she had started her morning with an enormous pot of it at home as she had continued filling in her map and noting down further questions. Feeling as if she’d be lifted by a tide of orange pekoe and float away, she sat in the kitchen, stirring sugar into a pale pink cup while the Hughes ladies examined the photo she had brought. She had stopped first at the Armstrongs, who had suspended their industrious and mysterious work in the garden and gazed at the photo of the locket. Both shook their heads. It meant nothing to them.

  She had decided she might as well spend the rest of the afternoon getting ‘round to everyone with the photo of the locket. It was a fine day, the air redolent with the green smell of earth and new growth, and she relished walking along the paths and byways that connected all the families. It gave her a more visceral sense of how the people in the early settlement would have connected and interacted that breathed life into her map and into her sense of the past. And so she had begun just up the hill, with the Hughes.

  Lifting their glasses and peering with the photo held at a distance, and putting their glasses on and moving it close, the three ladies frowned in turn at the picture.

  “Well, that’s not much to look at, is it?” Gladys finally declared. “It could be anyone’s. I have one of those in an old jewel box somewhere myself.”

  “It is kind of ordinary,” Gwen agreed. “I mean, one feels like one’s seen one around somebody’s neck, doesn’t one?”

  “Whose neck?” asked Mabel.

  “Not anyone particularly . . . just around necks. This was around that poor child’s neck?” Gwen asked.

  Lane downed a gulp of well-sugared tea. “Yes. It’s odd, because you don’t expect something like this to be on someone buried in this secretive way. Is it something that someone would wear all the time, even at night, if it had pictures inside? Was it something the child had been given by her mother? I can’t see a child wearing this at all, out here.”

  Mabel shook her head. “The whole thing is ridiculous. What?” She said sharply to her sister, who had her eyes nearly shut in an effort to remember.

  “You know, I think I have seen it, or its twin. Closer to home, I just can’t remember at all where. It’s so aggravating to have it on the tip of my brain. No. It’s gone. It could have been Mummy’s, after all.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t wear mine all the time . . . haven’t for years. Extremely unsuitable for the kind of work we do. Even with pictures. I think mine has a very faded picture of my granny looking like a wrinkled apple in a lacy black bonnet. She looked like she was ready for the last trump. She was a very disapproving old thing. I must have taken it off before I even married. Here, I’ll fetch it.” Gladys disappeared down the hall and returned in short order. “It was easier to find than I thought. Look. There she is, the old Tatar.”

  Lane smiled. “It’s remarkable how disapproving our ancient relatives always look. The corsets, I expect!”

  When Lane had gone home with a new basket of eggs, the Hughes women, skirting the destroyed root cellar with its sinister gap still under the tarpaulin, resumed their usual rounds of activity in an unspoken rebellion against sentimentality. Gladys turning over soil in the garden, Mabel scouring out the larder in a fit of spring cleaning, and Gwen shovelling the winter’s accumulation of mud off the slate path they had built from the path to the chicken coop and looking for damage in the fencing.

  Gwen leaned on the shovel and watched the chickens fluffing their feathers as though to let in the new air of the coming spring. There was a light breeze, and she was reluctant to get started. She had a sneaking suspicion that the minor aches she was beginning to feel at the end of a day of work might have something to do with age, but she put this firmly out of mind. There was no use thinking like that. No one else was going to shovel the path.

  But, as though the lifting air itself was trying to speak to her, she found her mind going back to the problem. She hadn’t wanted to say, but there was the echo of an unpleasantness about her fleeting memory of the locket. Or a locket, anyway. Or was her discomfort something to do with the note she had discovered in Mabel’s trunk? No, it was the locket. Maybe she was remembering because of having looked in the trunk, maybe it had unleashed all kinds of memories from that time. Who here would wear a locket? Or would have given one to a small child? With a sigh she turned back to the path and began to scrape away with the shovel. She was systematically going through people she might have seen with such a locket. It’s something you’d see in the summertime, when clothes were more revealing. She tried to think of people she knew when she was young, at summer fetes, or the post office, or church, and shook her head. She could barely conjure up the faces of some of the children who had lived here; she would never remember something as specific as a piece of jewellery.

  The damp slabs of slate finally revealed, Gwen leaned on her shovel and thought suddenly, that’s the point. First of all, who would wear a gold locket in this workaday community, and second, it was so specific, she ought to remember. Isabel, she thought. How she had disapproved of her! Wet, she’d called her. Why had she disliked her so much? Because Isabel was pretty and she was afraid that John would like her? Isabel would be an old woman now, just like her. Why was she thinking of her, of all people? But she knew. Because of the memory of her at the dance. Because of the note signed “B.” That whole family seemed suddenly to be swimming into focus. Gwen tried to imagine a locket around Isabel’s neck, but try as she might she could not. Musing about the errant and changeable nature of memory, she pushed the shovel back into its place in the shed and turned to contemplate the pigs. A heavier job, to be sure, but the thing with pigs is that they are ever so much more responsive than chickens.

  September, 1909

  “I’ll let you go by lunchtime today,” Lady Armstrong said, pleased with the surprise for the children. Of course, it was really because it was early September, and the children would all have chores to do as the fruit season got going, but they would still feel like they’d been given something special. Sixteen-year-old Gwen was resting her head on her arm, looking at delicate, pretty Isabel who sat shyly by the window, her hands folded in front of her on the desk, as if she had had much sterner teachers somewhere. Her little brother sat in front o
f her in the same position. Gwen was aware of being annoyed by Isabel and felt a stirring of guilt because Isabel was shy and had never done anything to her.

  “Gwen, are you in another world?” Lady Armstrong’s voice penetrated her reverie and Gwen sat up with embarrassment. “I asked what you’d do with your afternoon?” The girl looked around quickly to see if anyone was laughing, but aside from Mabel who was shaking her head, the students were paying her no mind, already anxious to be out the door.

  “I don’t know, Miss. I expect Mother and Father will have things for us to do.” She felt a bit superior saying this, looking again at Isabel. No one ever saw her mother, after all. She was probably “having the vapours.” That’s what Mum had said. Gwen had not missed the hint of disapproval in her mother’s voice about anyone having the luxury to be poorly in a place like this.

  Outside, Bob, eating an apple, said, “Come on little Joe, Izzy, Andrew. Let’s get a move on. Father will have work for us.” He took Joe gently by the hand and nodded at the other boys. Gwen watched Isabel leaning over to do up Andrew’s shoelace before they set off. Joe wasn’t often in school. Today he had sat at the desk with Bob, leaning his head on his arms, looking up at Lady Armstrong who had read them a story. He had looked up at Bob from time to time, smiling with surprise and delight when Lady Armstrong raised her voice dramatically, acting all the parts.

  Gwen could hear Lady Armstrong saying goodbye to each of them as she did at the end of every day. She turned to acknowledge the “Goodbye, Gwenny” with a wave and then turned back to look at Isabel, frowning.

  She waited till she and Mabel had separated from the Armstrong boys and were on their way up the hill to their house, and then she said, “You know what? Isabel is wearing a gold locket! Can you believe it?” Mabel walked on without responding.

  “They are so poor. Isabel wears the same thing every day, and Bob’s trousers have patches on the knees. And that Joe is a fright. He looks like a puff of wind would blow him away. They obviously don’t feed him enough. I’m astonished she can parade around like that. Where would she get it, anyway?”

  At this, Mabel stopped and turned on her sister. “I don’t know why you have it in for poor Isabel. She wouldn’t hurt a fly, and so what if they’re poor? How is it any of our business? We’re only not poor because Daddy works so hard. Not every family is lucky. Mr. Anscomb . . . well, never mind. Why don’t you try to be nice for once, instead of a spoiled brat?”

  GWEN LEANED ON the fence watching the pigs rooting among the potato peelings in the trough. She felt paralyzed by the dawning memory of a gold locket on the neck of Isabel. She tried to grasp why the memory was tinged with distaste. She had disliked Isabel in the thoughtless way a young girl might.

  Had she been jealous? Isabel had been very pretty, very close to her brothers, timid, and soft-spoken. Involuntarily Gwen looked back across the yard at where the tarpaulin still hung over the root cellar, feeling herself grow cold. Had it been Isabel, or one of her little brothers, Joseph or that plucky Andrew, in the cold, muddy ground? “Oh dear me, no!” she whispered. “No, no.” She stumbled away from the pigpen onto the sweep of damp lawn and looked at the house. Would they see her? She darted past the side of the house, past the looming cellar, and then stopped for a moment to look at it, her heart pounding. On the way down the hill, thoughts were coming in sickening legions. She could see Andrew clearly for a second. Short but strong, dark blond hair. A bit of spunk. Not like Isabel. Had someone killed one of them and left them there? Ridiculous, she knew it. Had Bob? Who would do such a thing? Why?

  LANE LOOKED UP in surprise when she heard her door open and saw Gwen burst through the door of the kitchen.

  “I have to talk to you. I think . . . I don’t know what I think . . . it’s horrible!”

  Lane pulled a chair out and cleared the papers off the table. She had been preparing to brave a trip to see the Mathers, but she’d seen their little car trundling down the road on her way back from the Hughes place so she had decided to come home and consolidate her notes. She might wait till closer to dinnertime, and then, forgetting her earlier resolution to walk, drive around with the photo. “Gwen, sit down. You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

  Gwen sat and took a few deep breaths. “I remembered where I’ve seen that locket . . . or a locket like it. Only that means it could be Isabel, or one of the little boys who were her brothers. Who else? Who would do such a thing?”

  Unable to make sense of this, Lane said soothingly, “Why don’t you start at the beginning and just tell me what you remember.”

  “Yes, all right. Remember we told you about that family, the Anscombs? Mabel was soft on the oldest boy, Bob.” She stopped and put her hand to her mouth. “Oh my, I shouldn’t have said that. I . . . I just found it out myself, I mean, I think she was.” Gwen was seeing herself going through her sister’s trunk. An unforgivable intrusion. With an effort she continued. “Anyway, they came here when I was about fifteen, and they lived in that house up the hill, past the Yanks. They were poor as dirt and peculiar. We never did see the mother. I mean, we must have sometime, but I don’t remember. But Bob and his dad tried to grow apples, and they all came to the school some of the time. There was Bob, and then Isabel, and then Andrew, and then a littler one who hardly ever came to school. And then some tiny child; a baby I think. I don’t even know if there were other children at home. I don’t remember them well, such a strange family. Anyway, about Isabel, I didn’t like her very much, so I was always noticing things, and I’m pretty sure I saw her with the locket. I’m sorry to say I was very disapproving because I thought that as a poor girl she had no right to wear a gold locket.”

  “Do you remember when you saw her with it?”

  “Not really. I have this idea that it was at school, maybe the fall? I think that it was then because we were picking apples and packing them. I don’t remember anything else. Does this mean it’s her, or poor little Andrew that . . . ?”

  “I don’t think we should jump to conclusions yet. It is amazing how many different things a few facts can suggest, and the truth is often something no one expected. Have you told Gladys and Mabel?”

  Gwen looked away, embarrassed. “No. I don’t know why. I’m a bit ashamed of how I treated Isabel. I still look back on it and wish I’d been kinder. And then she sort of disappeared and I never had a chance. Mabel used to give me hell for it. I was too much of a miss to pay a sister any attention, I can tell you. But I did like that little boy, Andrew, that’s why I can’t bear to think . . .”

  Lane sat for a few moments looking out at the lake. She thought about Gwen’s assertion that she liked the boy called Andrew, and so it was unthinkable that he should have been the one to die. We so want only unlikeable people to be killed. But life doesn’t organize along the lines of our prejudices, and an early death is never fair.

  “What do you mean, she ‘disappeared’?” Lane asked. Clouds had begun to gather against the mountains, and the warmth of the earlier part of the day was being swallowed up in the chill of the oncoming evening.

  Gwen shifted uneasily. “I only meant . . . oh dear . . . could it be her? I thought she’d gone at the same time as the rest of them. It’s all so vague in my mind.”

  Lane had gotten some information, as instructed, but she felt puzzled as to what to do now. Gwen seemed reluctant to talk to her family . . . should she encourage her to do it, and perhaps stimulate a long-buried memory, or wait to see if one of them remembered something on her own? She could leave it for a bit, but go across to Kenny and Eleanor. And she realized that she now had more to talk to Reginald Mather and Robin Harris about.

  She could ask questions about their memories of the Anscombs. Mabel had been “soft” on Bob. What did that mean? Did they have a secret understanding? Or had they had a big engagement party and everyone knew? It hadn’t amounted to anything because the Anscombs had left before the Great War. Should she phone Darling and tell him this much, or wait till she got mor
e? And what would any of it have to do with the dead child?

  “It’s fantastic that you remembered this, Gwen. Did Mabel and Bob Anscomb have an engagement, or an understanding of some sort?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. At least I don’t think so . . . But I think if there was something, he wanted her to keep it secret. I don’t know why I even remembered it. It must be something I thought when we were younger and . . .” Gwen trailed off.

  “Do you think you will say anything to your mother and sister? I only ask because they might remember things as well that could be helpful,” Lane said.

  “Mabel will be merry hell if I don’t and then she finds out I told you first. But now if I go back, she’ll ask where I’ve been, so I don’t even think I can fib about it.”

  “Just tell her you weren’t sure how important it was and wanted to check with me. That should cover a multitude of sins.”

  AFTER GWEN LEFT, Lane sat down and looked at the tentative timeline she’d started. What year would Gwen have been fifteen? She was fifty something now . . . 1907? 1908? She put a mark on her line, wrote the year, and above it: Anscombs arrive. And they left “before the war.” She had originally put that at 1913. Was that right? Or was it earlier? She pencilled “1911” and then “1912” on the line along with “Anscombs leave?” And, she thought grimly, here were some names of possible victims: Isabel, or either of her brothers. There was at least a locket now possibly belonging to Isabel. If it was Isabel, she must have been tiny. She must ask Kenny what he remembered about her. Gwen seemed most upset about it possibly being Andrew, but the presence of the locket surely meant it was not a boy. And she had said “Bob and Isabel left,” but she’d been young; she could have meant the whole family but used only the names of the people closest to her own age, as a child would when speaking of a family. But it could also mean that Andrew hadn’t been there. She wrote this name down and underlined it. Calculating that Reginald Mather and Robin Harris might both be at home about now, Lane took her jacket from the hook in the hall and went out to her car. She’d finish her notes tonight, call Darling in the morning with what she had, and then maybe go up to the house where the Anscombs had lived.