Mr. Flood's Last Resort

by Jess Kidd

  “They say a lot of things about the Floods.”

  The housekeeper opens the door and points up the path. “Now aim yourself in that direction and don’t come back. Pretending to be a police without even making an appointment.”

  When I’m halfway down the path I glance back at the house. Mrs. Frog has closed the door and hopped off to squat in the kitchen and encourage the flies, but I feel certain that Father Quigley is watching me from behind the net-curtained window of his study.

  * * *

  AS I wait for the bus I think about Father Quigley and his housekeeper, each holding a portrait of Mary in their minds. Mary the good woman, the grieving mother, the woman astray in the head, who slept on the beach while her child drowned.

  I add their memories to my own portrait of Mary. The regal beauty who married a rich old widower and cried when he died. Who burnt faces from photographs and wore Dorothy-red shoes and carried gold clutch bags. Who fell down, down a staircase, from top to bottom and never woke up again.

  But then I think about what St. Dymphna says about the memory. And I wonder: In all these long years of remembering Mary has she changed at all for the people who knew her? Have they welded new bits onto their memory of her, or revised it completely? Or have the details stayed sharp and clear and true?

  Should I tell them, if they don’t already know? Memory is like a wayward dog. Sometimes it drops the ball and sometimes it brings it, and sometimes it doesn’t bring a ball at all; it brings a shoe.

  CHAPTER 19

  The wind grabbed a handful of sand and scattered it like bright confetti along the hard-packed, sea-scoured, deserted beach. The sky had a newly rinsed look, the clouds spun and wrung out on high.

  I remember now what she was wearing: a halter-neck dress in pale-blue lace.

  We slipped off our sandals when we reached the planked walkway through the dune field. The wood was warm and weatherworn. She told me to wait and then she walked off across the sand.

  A scowling angel, shoulder blades like wing buds. Blown brown halo of hair.

  Three things were different on the day Deirdre disappeared: it was properly hot (for the first and only time that summer), the sky was empty of seabirds (when usually they screamed and tumbled above us with clamorous joy), and Old Noel’s kiosk was closed.

  CHAPTER 20

  I’d have a job to hear Cathal creeping up behind me with the sound of my own heart thumping in my ears. I climb quickly, picking my way through the landslide of curiosities on the staircase. I only hope Beckett has survived his incarceration and I’m not risking my life for a dead cat.

  Mary Flood still haunts the portrait on the landing with her burning hair and fugitive beauty. Frozen by conflicting impulses: should she stay or should she run?

  This must have been how Cathal first saw her: a stricken young widow dressed in black. I edge along the landing and open the door to the white room.

  There is no sign of Beckett, other than a dip in the counterpane and a few pale hairs. Otherwise the room is exactly as I left it, with the door to the dressing room open and Mary’s gowns slung over the chair.

  And her initials still on the mirror, etched in dust.

  M F

  I don’t know why, but I expected the letters to be gone. I walk over and study them closely. As I’d rummaged through the frocks next door, had a ghost drifted into the room, glided up to this mirror, and traced these letters in the dust?

  I touch nothing; although I feel bad leaving Mary’s things strewn around, tidying up could incriminate me. I leave the room, closing the door quietly.

  I’m at the top of the stairs when I hear a scratching noise. I stop and listen. Next I hear a faint plaintive meowing. Swearing softly to myself, I track back along the landing. A few doors on from the white room there’s the muffled scrabbling of claws against wood.

  “Beckett?” I whisper.

  I try the handle. The cat bounds past me and down the stairs without a backwards glance, knocking over artifacts and instruments.

  The sound reverberates through the house.

  In the musty depths of Cathal’s lair, one eye flicks open.

  Noise has pulled on the strings of his web, setting his long limbs twitching. He’ll be slinking out of his trapdoor and threading through the rubbish. Crawling up the staircase with a knife clamped between his dentures and a lasso of fuse wire in his hand, ready to garrote me and hack me to pieces.

  I listen. Nothing moves below.

  I step inside the room and close the door behind me. The curtains are closed and the light switch doesn’t work. I cross the carpet and pull the drapes open.

  My retinas are awash.

  It is a mirror image of the white room. On the left is the door I know will lead to a dressing room. There is a bed fit for a princess and a dressing table before the window.

  Only the color is different. This room is red, as red as the devil’s own dancing shoes. All shades are represented here, from carmine to garnet, ruby to cardinal, maroon to vermillion. On the walls a pattern as big as a tea tray is repeated, gouts of claret arc from three-tiered fountains silhouetted in black. The bed is dressed with red brocades, satins, and velvets. On the wall above in a lacquered frame, a line of splayed and pinned moths, every insect a dark clot of a warning. At the center is a furred beast of monumental proportions, the fat stalk of its body covered in plush. One white spot on each outstretched wing of black funeral crepe: two blind eyes. On either side smaller insects are ranged, their wings showing deco patterns, filigrees of red on black, like blood vessels.

  On the chaise, upholstered in black velvet, a chorus of Pierrot dolls regard me balefully. A heavy black teardrop rests on every white cheek and each wears a wilting ruff. Every red mouth is painted with a downturned smile. And there it is: the Pierrot with a torn ruff and a malevolent stare, with its cap gone and a fuzz of fair hair. Bandages trail from its wrists.

  I sit down at the dressing table and open the drawer. Inside a velvet box I find a remarkable piece of jewelry. A spider, its abdomen a bulging garnet, feeds on a fly held in the cradle of its mandible. I touch it and the fly falls out of the spider’s grip to hang on a fine chain, swinging beneath, free again. There is a tiny pin on each so that the wearer can grant the spider a meal or allow the fly to hover under its predator’s nose. I put the brooch back, alongside a brush and comb set inlaid with polished jet and smoky glass bottles with moldering contents.

  I get up and open the door to the dressing room. There’s a mirror and an ebony bentwood chair.

  The wardrobe is disappointing. Inside there are no bright gowns, only a few coats smelling of mothballs. Big buttoned and fur trimmed and uniformly bedraggled.

  But this room is a mirror image.

  Something must be hidden in this wardrobe. Some counterpart to the Mass cards: another clue. I take out the coats and lay them on the chair, methodically checking the pockets, feeling around the lining.

  Then I hear a bang.

  * * *

  I AM intact.

  Not dead.

  I come out of the dressing room.

  On the bed, broken apart, is the moth-filled frame. I open the door a fraction and peer out into the hallway. There is no sign of Cathal roaring up the stairs yet. I close the door and turn back to the bed.

  The glass has shattered extravagantly, as if the frame has been blown open by an incendiary device. It has landed moth side up with some of the insects thrown clear of the wreckage. The mother of all moths lies in the middle of the bed; she has lost part of her wing and her legs on one side. With the glass gone she looks even more horribly alive. As if, at any moment, she might start limping over the counterpane, trying out her tattered wings.

  Something catches my eye. Just under the broken frame, a wisp of ribbon. I pull it and beneath the blasted moths something comes slithering. The string is attached to an envelope: medium-sized, manila.

  I work swiftly, pulling up my shirt and tucking the envelope into the w
aistband of my jeans. I pick up the counterpane, knot the ends together, and, moving the broken glass as quietly as I can, bundle it up and put it in the bottom of the wardrobe. I straighten the bed and hang the remaining coats back up unchecked.

  As I step out of the room I look towards the dressing table mirror.

  It’s undisturbed. It appears I’ve got the message now.

  CHAPTER 21

  I look at Renata and she looks back at me. We both look at the manila envelope on the coffee table.

  An unlit pipe is between her lips. She’s promised not to light it, only that she needs something to clamp her jaw around to calm her nerves.

  “Open the envelope, Maud,” she murmurs.

  I don’t think I want to.

  I stand up and walk over to the kitchen window. She is still there, St. Dymphna, flitting after the neighborhood cat.

  She has abandoned her crown and veil and her sandals. They lie shining on the rockery. Her brown hair flies behind her; now and again she stops, catches up her unraveling plait and chews the end of it absorbedly, watching for the cat’s next move. Then the nimbus of light that surrounds her lovely head sparks and flares and her face glows with delight and she makes a grab. There’s a flash of bare feet and a peal of wicked laughter.

  * * *

  THE FLAP is taped down. I walk the knife carefully along it. Inside there are newspaper cuttings. I unfold them, smoothing them down and laying them out on the table.

  Picture after picture of Maggie Dunne.

  There are other pictures too. Of the police searching a furrowed field, of a wooded copse with tree roots gnarling the banks, and of an old sanatorium set in lawned gardens.

  I pick up a cutting towards the top of the pile and read it out loud. “Thursday, 29 August 1985, ‘Chief Constable Frank Gaunt has confirmed that Dorset police are widening the search for Maggie Dunne amid increasing concerns for her welfare. Maggie, a resident of Cedar House children’s home, was last seen around midday on Tuesday, 20 August.’ ”

  As I flick through the rest of the cuttings I notice the articles getting smaller, dwindling to no more than a line in the Dorset Echo six months later reporting an unconfirmed sighting of Maggie in Dover. There the trail ends.

  “So Maggie was in care?” says Renata.

  “Looks like it.”

  I glance out of the window. St. Dymphna is nowhere to be seen. An uneasy feeling is growing in my stomach: a queasy sense of excitement, with a dash of inevitability about it.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that Mary kept these cuttings?” asks Renata.

  “Perhaps no stranger than your collection of true-life crime magazines. What’s stranger is that she went to such lengths to hide them.”

  St. Dymphna peers in at the window; she presses her face through the glass and frowns. Then she stalks into the room and flops down in front of the television.

  Renata turns to me, her expression solemn. “Mary was onto something. She was trying to solve the mystery of Maggie’s disappearance. She couldn’t save her own child, Marguerite, so she was driven by a need to save someone else’s, to try to set things right on some level, in some way.”

  I inadvertently glance towards St. Dymphna. She sits on the hearthrug, small and still and suddenly far older than her fifteen years, with her dark eyes burning and her face unearthly pale.

  “We need to find Maggie,” says Renata. “There’s something we could try.”

  “What is it?”

  “We could try asking Mary.”

  St. Dymphna watches me closely, coldly.

  “I’ll do whatever it takes,” I whisper.

  St. Dymphna scrabbles to her feet and is gone.

  CHAPTER 22

  The best place to start is right here in the kitchen at Bridlemere. Supernatural occurrences have taken place in this room. The best time to start is right now, when there is no sign of the old man.

  I push a chair in front of the kitchen door. If Cathal tries to come in I’ll have time to cover everything up and pretend I’m washing the floor. Otherwise the back door is locked and there are no cats in the scullery.

  These are the perfect conditions for working a spirit board.

  I have a shot glass from Renata’s sideboard and two cereal boxes opened up and stuck together. I have drawn letters from the alphabet and numbers and written YES and NO in the two top corners. I sit down on the kitchen floor and wait, with my fingertips on the top of the glass.

  This happens, in this order: my nose itches, the crack of my arse itches, the tap drips. Then: nothing.

  I take out the photo of Mary and Gabriel and look into the space where Mary’s face should be.

  I close my eyes.

  “Are you there, Mary?”

  The tap drips, the clock ticks, a cat scratches at the back door. After a while my fingertips cramp on the edge of the glass and one of my legs falls asleep.

  “Mary, if you have a minute?”

  I stretch out my leg and rub it. Then I look around the kitchen, edified by the immaculate floor. If only I could get my own home into this kind of order. I put my fingers back on the glass, close my eyes, and concentrate. I throw out a question.

  “Do you know what happened to Maggie Dunne?”

  This happens, in this order: the kettle switches itself on and starts to boil, the door to the pantry opens, and the glass begins to move, slowly, jerkily towards—

  YES.

  The glass stops and waits, shuddering under my fingertips; the kettle switches itself off.

  I close my eyes.

  “Was she murdered?”

  Nothing. Then a powerful smell of earth and leaf mold as a sudden mist of moisture hits my face. I open my eyes. The room darkens abruptly, although it is still sunny outside the kitchen window.

  The glass begins to tremble, drawing my attention back to the spirit board. My finger does nothing; it merely goes along for the ride as the glass moves in slow circles around the word . . .

  YES.

  The top pops off a lemonade bottle and the clock falls off the wall. The kitchen lights turn themselves on and off and crockery starts to shake on the dresser. A milk jug skips from its hook and crashes to the floor and the knife drawer slowly opens.

  I would run if I could take my finger off the glass, but it is held rooted to the spot by a strange quivering magnetism.

  YES. YES. YES.

  I take a deep breath. The glass bucks under my finger, as if it knows what I’m about to ask.

  “Were you murdered, Mary?”

  The glass hops and the door to the pantry slams shut and flies open. The packets of rice and sugar and semolina, the tins of ham and peach slices begin to fling themselves off the shelves. Bags hit the ground, bursting and rupturing; jars explode into shards.

  “Who did it, Mary?”

  The table judders and the kettle switches itself on again, with the noise of water rushing to the boil.

  The glass cleaves to the board and refuses to move.

  I wait.

  “Was it Cathal?”

  Nothing.

  I try another question. “Is Maggie here?”

  The glass spins, wrenches itself out from under my finger and shatters itself against the wall.

  * * *

  I FOLD the spirit board, put the packets and tins back on the shelves, and take up the broom.

  And then I see them. Heading towards the back door, two sets of footprints in the mess that dusts the floor. They pull apart, each on their own trajectory halfway across the kitchen. As they draw closer to the back door they change. The last prints, just near the threshold, are the dabbed pattern of toes and no heel: the prints of two people running.

  CHAPTER 23

  At the café Sam takes a seat, not in the corner but over near the window. I head to the lavatory, past the waiter who narrows his eyes at me in greeting. I ignore him. I am buoyed up by a great and happy coincidence: this morning I put on a dress.

  A rare choice born n
ot from some unearthly premonition but because the dress was the only clean garment available besides a pair of ungainly culottes of unknown provenance. I thank any and all listening saints for this premium stroke of good fortune as I slip off my tabard and rummage in my bag for a lipstick.

  Then I look at myself in the mirror.

  Then I immediately revoke my thanks in case any of the saints are listening and think twice about the lipstick. Then I tighten my ponytail and remember Renata’s disparaging comments about this exact same ensemble when I presented myself, some months ago, with great reluctance and even greater misgivings, for a conscripted date with the satellite TV repairman. Renata said that in this dress (gray shift, stylishly demure) with my hair pulled back I looked like an uptight novitiate knocking at Mother Superior’s gates. I took that as a compliment.

  I sit down opposite Sam with the late-afternoon sun behind me, feeling like a backlit Deborah Kerr but without the wimple.

  The café is empty apart from me and Sam, and the saints squabbling into nearby seats, elbowing each other and hissing in a bid to appear unobtrusive.

  St. Valentine settles in the seat next to me. “Steady, Twinkle,” he says. “I’ve got your back.”

  St. Rita and St. George take seats at the table opposite. St. Monica, liverish in cream, arranges her robes sourly in a corner. St. Dymphna is nowhere to be seen. Small mercies.

  I smile at Sam and Sam smiles at me.

  “For the love of God,” barks St. Valentine. “Will you stop grinning or he’ll think you’re unraveled in the head. Ask him a question. Start a conversation.”

  “So you were in the neighborhood, just passing by?” I ask.

  St. Valentine rolls his eyes. “Smooth.”