Wrong Turn - I Find Myself Alone

by Zoe Jasmine

  Enough of this. She was working herself up into a good case of the jitters. She located the TV eventually in the kitchen, underneath a drop cloth. The workers had been keeping an eye on something while they worked, or ate their sandwiches. She dragged it into the lounge and propped it on the massive Iberian credenza that probably had housed the salvers and spoons of some order of nuns now extinct. But before she could find the remote, she dialed her number at home to check her messages, in case John had called while she was in the air.

  The voice of the recording told Winnie that she had seven new messages. The first five were hang-ups, worrying in their own right, as most callers who didn't want to leave a message slammed down the receiver quickly once they realized it was a recording. Not to do so was in itself a message: This is a hang-up: I know you're not there, and you know I know, but you don't know who I am.

  Maybe computerized telemarketing calls, she asked herself, or Ironcorp, responding at last?

  The sixth call was from Winnie's agent, asking how long was she going to be away, and when could they expect the new manuscript; her editor would love to begin to breathe word of a second Ophelia Marley book in the pipeline even if it was a year upstream yet. “This is the novel?” said the agent with dubious enthusiasm, having pressed for a Dark Side of the Zodiac II in one form or another. “Your Romanian book, isn't it?” He sounded defeated already. A month in Romania is hardly A Year in Provence, he meant. Winnie deleted the message. Whether it would be a second book by Ophelia Marley or a first-ever Winifred Rudge adult novel, she wasn't sure. She still couldn't know if she would be able to write the story of Wendy Pritzke. Nor if there was any story there to be written.

  The seventh voice was familiar but newly so, and she couldn't place it at first. Male. “You mentioned you've suffered a breach of security; what is that all about? Are you cowering behind a potted palm with nothing to defend yourself but a plastic spatula from Williams-Sonoma? If so, come out, come out, wherever you are. We're going to have a meal at Legal Seafoods over near M.I.T., and we'd love you to join us. We'll tell you what you missed during the second half of the indoctrination session. And by the way, I'm cute but I'm real dumb. Only in my fourth-grade classroom this morning did I put you together with the W. Rudge who wrote Crazy Hassan's End-of-Season Flying Carpet Sale . My students die over that one.” He left a number. It was that Adrian Moscou of the Forever Families meeting. He was feeling guilty over having blown her cover. And well he might. Still, it was decent of him to call.

  The juddery pipe slammed again, deep in the walls, so loud that it startled her. She dialed the Massachusetts number, her finger readying to break the connection if one of them answered in person. Mercifully a machine picked up. “Winnie Rudge returning your call. I'm away for a while, in Europe. Back, oh—whenever. But do keep in touch. And beware going ahead with that adoption group, they're all charlatans and hucksters.” She stuttered the sentence to a stop, and then added, “I don't mean that, of course, I'm trying to be witty and it doesn't work at this distance. Here's my number, but don't call me.” She left John's number. The shallow good wishes of an Adrian Moscou were probably the more welcome, since John Comestor seemed to have abandoned her without a moment's thought.

  The TV was unusually banal for Britain. Channel Four seemed to be importing more and more American sitcoms and the standard was dropping. She turned it off. The room known as “her” room, a half-bedroom forced into a space created because the staircase didn't continue to the roof, was dingily comfortable, warm at least, and she pawed through some paperbacks on the windowsill. Edmund Crispin, Hilary Mantel, several Ishiguros. Then an old Iris Murdoch, its orange Penguin spine bleached citron by sunlight. She settled under the duvet and opened the book at random, and read.

  “The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. . . .”

  She put the book down. The pipes in the back of the house continued to bang, intermittently, well into the first stages of sleep, when her body could only remember flying, pitching through nothingness at all those hundreds of miles an hour, and then she was sleeping faster than the speed of sound, so the clanging pipes were left behind.

  She lay in bed. Through the gauze she could see the sun, an imprecise disk in a sky the color of weak tea. The bells of St. John-at-Hampstead tolled the hour of nine, and a few minutes later she was in the bathroom when she heard a key in the lock. She called out, “Hi, you!” in case he'd be alarmed, though she knew if he was coming home from an escapade he'd be as embarrassed as startled by her presence.

  She finished her teeth and came out. It wasn't John, but a couple of workers in sweatshirts and jeans.

  “Well,” she said. “Good morning. I'm the house guest.”

  She could sense them holding back from glancing at each other. An uneasiness to it. “Come in, come in, I'm presentable, aren't I?” Her terry-cloth robe was snugly wrapped up to her clavicle. “I won't be in your way, will I?”

  “Sorry, we weren't expecting you,” said the slighter one, an Irish slip of a kid, barely in his twenties. “Or not exactly you.” The older man shrugged off his wet jacket and just looked over the top of his glasses at her. Winnie took a step back and decided not to speak again until she was dressed.

  She emerged fifteen minutes later. The guys had set themselves up in the kitchen. The fellows moved with a feminine deliberateness, laying out tools precisely, like nurses arranging the sterilized implements for a surgery. “I'm Winnie, a friend of John's,” she said, with relish smashing around an old percolator as she prepared her coffee.

  “I'm Jenkins,” said the older man, “and this is Mac.” Mac grinned in a snaggle-toothed way, looking both innocent and weaselly.

  “Didn't John tell you I was coming? Do you know where he is or when he'll be back?”

  “We were hoping you'd be able to tell us where Mr. C is,” said Jenkins.

  “I thought he'd be here, but he's been cleared out a little while now, to judge by the mail,” said Winnie. “When did you last see him?”

  “Monday,” said the older man. “Mr. C called us here and gave us our instructions. Some kitchen reconstruction. He drew out his plans for us well enough, and gave us a key, but he led us to believe he'd be in and out all week. And he's just vanished.”

  “How much work have you managed to get done since Monday?” asked Winnie, trying not to sound schoolmarmish. It didn't look like much.

  “We've been here eight hours a day, nearly, for four days,” said Jenkins, looking at Winnie in the eye, which seemed to suggest defensiveness.

  Mac sunk his hands into the pockets of his loose workman's trousers and rubbed his upper thighs in a slow motion. His voice went ominous even despite the late-adolescent squeak of it. “A bad job, this, but we've been at work .” Winnie felt a chill—she didn't know these guys from Adam. And where was John? She looked up from the sack of ground coffee. “I'm not sure there's milk,” she said as casually as she could, beginning to sidle away from them.

  “Oh, there's milk,” said Mac, “milk there is. We brought a carton.”

  “I take two percent. I'll just run out—” Was the security chain attached and the bolt drawn, or had they just let the door close behind them? “Why don't you fellows find the plans and let me see them when I get back? Anything else you want while I'm out?” She held up the percolator and tried not to break into nervous giggles: hers was an interrogative gesture that could be read two ways: Coffee, anyone? or Would you care to be scalded into first-degree burns?

  They didn't answer, which froze her in her pose for an extra few seconds, and then she was interrupted in her campaign to flee by the sound of knocking. It originated behind the pantry wall, much like the rap of human knuckles on wood. Three, four, five times.

  “Well, hello, SOS in the baseboards
,” she said, and to conceal her unfounded sense of vulnerability, “so what have you done with John? Walled him up?”

  “No, ma'am, we didn't do it,” said young Mac, tensing and relaxing in an epileptic movement, a sort of shimmy.

  “Ah, but it's not her from in there, then,” said Jenkins, reaching out to touch Mac. “Steady, lad. She's not the one.”

  “What have you done with John?” she said. She couldn't look toward the pantry as the raps began again, a sequence of five hollow ominous penetrating thumps.

  “Oh, not a thing,” said Jenkins.

  Mac blew out through his nostrils, a colt shying. “Give us a turn, will you? Showing up without notice? We thought it was you done that knocking. Coulda been so. But there it goes again.”

  “You're mad,” said Winnie in a voice she hoped sounded reasonable and disarming. There was some hesitant light in the greasy sky, some wind kicking grit and desultory rain against windows. It was London in November, neither more nor less. “How long has this been going on?”

  “The week.”

  “What are you talking about?” A knocking pipe, surely. A stone rolling in the backwash from a flushed toilet, echoing from the drain below. A bad board up on the roof, something telegraphing its Morse code into this space. “Tell me what John assigned you to do.” She was exasperated suddenly; why couldn't her stepcousin oversee his own redecoration?

  From an inside pocket, Jenkins took a sketch drawn in John's meticulous hand. Winnie could read it easily. The elimination of the pantry door, the crowbarring of the doorframe. The removal of the pantry shelves, the removal of the plaster from the back and side pantry walls. All to gain fourteen inches. By exposing the brick of the fireplace stack, some turnaround room would be freed up. For what? “Oh, I see,” she said, “roof access here. A staircase more ladder than anything else, and the roof garden he's been dreaming about ever since he inherited this place.”

  She looked up. She hadn't looked closely before. The old pantry doorframe had indeed been crowbarred out and the pantry shelves removed, and a few spot lamps shone brightly on the wall beyond. Half the plaster was already gone, revealing behind it not bricks but dingy white boards, vertically laid. On the plaster that remained she could see some faint dried brown streaks that suggested roofing problems. “So it's not such a huge job, is it? It took you four days to get this far? What's kept you? Bad weather for punching through to the roof?”

  “It's that thumping,” said Mac. “It's dangerous news.”

  “Well, you're out of your minds,” said Winnie, but less unkindly. “Have you gone downstairs to talk to the other residents in the building?”

  “The flat below is for sale, represented by Bromley Channing,” said Jenkins. “I don't think it's occupied. Nor did we go to the pensioner on the ground floor. Mr. Comestor didn't want us to let anyone know we were interfering with the original structure. There are regulations about this kind of job. He's doing this without planning permission from Camden Council.”

  “I know the downstairs lodger. Well, I've met her anyway, in the vestibule,” said Winnie. “I'll go see if she's having secret renovations of her own done. That's the eerie noise, no doubt. You're held up all week long by the sound of rapping?” She began to laugh. They looked affronted, and she didn't blame them, but she couldn't help it.

  “Don't be daft,” said Mac. “It's not just that.”

  Jenkins put his hand out. “Let her investigate, and if we get thrown out, it's a job we're well rid of. You'd choose to take it on your own shoulders, miss, we shouldn't say no to you.”

  They stood there momentarily. The rapping was silent now. As if something inside the wall were holding its breath, waiting to see what she would do. “Boggarts?” she said. “Goblins? Nice.”

  “Nothing so mild,” said Mac. His eyes slid away, his lower lip tightened.

  She was amazed she'd been alarmed at them, even for a moment. They were out of a pantomime, Good Gaffer Jenkins and his grandson, Dull Jack. Still she mustn't laugh at them. “Rudge House backs up on a property over on that other street, what is it, something Gardens. Rowancroft Gardens? Rudge House shares a party wall with one of those late-nineteenth-century redbrick homes around the way.” She pointed at the step down into the two-room nook he used as an office and a library space. “John's flat walks through right there, and borrows some space from that newer building. Anyone in that house could be buttering toast and you'd know it up here.”

  She went and slapped on some makeup to take care of the bags under her eyes, and thudded down the stairs with a will. Still stinging with the unexpected absence of her host, she felt brighter of spirit, at having something to do.

  The tenant on the ground floor of Rudge House was home. She opened the door timorously and peered through the crack. Winnie revved her volume up in respect for old-age deafness. “I'm Winifred, a friend of John Comestor from upstairs. May I come in?”

  “I'm hardly respectable on a Friday morning,” said the woman, “but enter at your own risk.” Winnie was let into a small, cramped front parlor with impressive molding and a fruity smell of flowers left in greening water. The tenant was a Mrs. Maddingly, and she behaved as if she were scared her name might come true. The front room was shingled with Post-it notes lecturing on household management. CLEAN THELINTTRAPsaid the TV. ISTHEREPOSTTODAY? asked the bookcase, which sported a shelf of Hummel figurines with their faces turned to the wall. MESSY! suggested a doorpost, apparently referring to a pile of newspapers on the floor. PILLS ATMIDDAYPILLSPILLSsaid a sheet of paper taped to a sofa cushion, and several other items of home decoration chimed in PILLS,PILLS. “How may I help you?” said Mrs. Maddingly, interrupting the published opinions of her furniture.

  Winnie perched on an ottoman without being asked, and said, “Forgive me for barging in like this. I'm staying upstairs while John is away, and I'm curious about the noises in the building.”

  “Oh, do you hear them too?” said Mrs. Maddingly. She was a tiny woman, and when she lifted one hand to steady herself on the mantelpiece she gave the impression of a commuter hanging on to a strap on the Tube. “I can't understand the language of it, can you?”

  “We hear a rapping noise upstairs, in the pantry wall I think, something that backs into the chimney stack,” said Winnie. “We thought you might be having some renovations done here.”

  “Nonsense, stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “I haven't lit a fire since the last time. I don't care for nosy neighbors, I'll tell you that, and how they alert the emergency services at a moment's notice. All their questions. Don't be forward, I told him.”

  “Are you alone here?” said Winnie. “Have workers been in?”

  “Well, there's the little ones,” said Mrs. Maddingly, “but I'd hardly call them workers. Slackers, more, skiving off whenever I'm not looking.”

  Winnie raised an eyebrow, feeling as if she hadn't actually woken up yet. This seemed a half-dream corrupted by jet-lag weariness. “Workers? On the premises?”

  Mrs. Maddingly nodded to the figurines but put her finger to her lips, as if she didn't want to say anything that would cause them to turn around.

  “Oh,” said Winnie. “But has anyone else been in your flat this week?”

  “Chutney sunlight, chamomile nightshade,” said Mrs. Maddingly. Winnie was prepared to write the old woman off as being, as the English so mercilessly say, completely gaga, when a straw-colored cat passed a doorway. Mrs. Maddingly remarked, “There's Chamomile now.” So the figurines were pressed against the wall to keep the cats from knocking them off the shelves, probably.

  “Mrs. Maddingly,” Winnie tried again, “there's a funny noise upstairs and I don't know what it is, and John isn't around to tell us. When did you last see him?”

  “Who?”

  “John Comestor.”

  The woman gave a wry smile that seemed to be detachable, like a Cheshire Cat smile, and said, “Days ago, or weeks, or was he down the stairs this morning?” She looked at a sign
on the mantelpiece. “I must remember not to forget my pills, you know.”

  “What language do you think it was?” said Winnie.

  “I'm not following you,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “The young are so imprecise in their speech. It's not their fault, but there you are.”

  “You said you'd heard noises and didn't know the language.”

  “Oh, I can't hear a thing except the cats,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “If you hadn't come to call they'd be yowling up a storm. Now as a rule I'm deafer than a stone wall. But all week they've been speaking very urgently indeed, as if they have something to tell me, only of course, who can speak the language of cats? Chutney is quite impossible, doesn't enunciate for one thing, and what vocabulary he has ever had is sorely dwindled to a few well-chosen syllables. The word for ghost is lost, for instance. But the cats are going on about something, although who can tell what it is?”

  Oh, John, thought Winnie, why aren't you sitting next to me to hear this? “You've been here a while, haven't you?” said Winnie, trying another approach.

  “Indeed I have,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “My husband and I moved in after the war. We once had two floors, don't you know, and we'd have liked to buy the whole house, but then I'm not talented at climbing stairs any longer, so maybe it's for the best. Anyway, poor Alan is dead, and that's fine, that's all right. We don't need the space now, and a good thing too. At today's prices, too dear by half. I couldn't afford to purchase an envelope anymore, so it's good all my friends are dead and not expecting the annual letter.”

  “You remember the upstairs. You lived there once,” deduced Winnie.

  “Oh, I did. Rooms, you know, rooms and rooms.” She waved her hand vaguely, as if there might once have been half a city block's worth of spare bedrooms and salons annexed to the house. “They've all been invaded by others.”