by Iona Whishaw
Much to the surprise of Gwen and Mabel, it was their octogenarian mother who had suggested the purchase of a small refrigerator a couple of years before, but they found very little use for it besides storing milk and setting butterscotch puddings, a great favourite of hers. The rest of their provisions they kept in the root cellar, as they had for over forty years—with no difficulty at all, thank you very much.
Gwen pulled jars of runner beans forward, and shone her flashlight into the dark behind them. With a small, victorious “Aha!” she found carrots labelled 1944, which they had not gotten to within the year, as they ought.
“I told her,” she said out loud. She took off her woollen pullover, laid it on a box of apples, and began to rearrange the jars, moving to the back those they had canned the summer before. There were three jars of carrots from ’44. She didn’t like to waste them, but didn’t want to eat them either. One year, that was her rule. She put them on the floor, by the door, and went back to her arranging. As she worked her way along the shelf, she identified one element of the smell: vinegar. At the back-most corner she saw where the difficulty lay. Part of the sod roof had fallen through the beams that made up the wood frame of the cellar, and broken several jars. Pickled beans and beets and some canned carrots had quietly mouldered on the shelf among the broken shards of glass. Feeling sheepish about how quick she was to blame her sister, she removed all the sound jars, stacked them on shelves on one side, and contemplated the damage. The glass would have to be swept up and the sod re-packed. Perhaps Robin could come and reinforce the roof. She or Mabel could do it well enough, but old Robin Harris would be hurt if not called out for this sort of thing.
She pushed open the cellar door, and the two cocker spaniels, wagging their tails expectantly, rushed to the top of the steps from where they had been lying at the front of the house.
“Get along with you!” she said, waving her arms at them. In the mud room she found what she was looking for: a dustpan, a small whisk broom, and a pair of leather gardening gloves.
“Mabel,” she called into the kitchen, “The bloody roof has sunk on the back side of the root cellar and broke some jars. You didn’t notice it, I don’t suppose, last time you were in there?”
Mabel looked up from where she was kneading bread. “I suppose if I had, I would have left it like that for someone else to clean up,” she retorted. “And mind the eggs when you’re in there. I put them up on the left, next to the potatoes.”
“I found three jars of carrots from nearly three years ago,” Gwen countered. “I thought we agreed to get to the vegetables within the year. I don’t know why you bother canning carrots, anyway. We have a whole box of them. They’re a root vegetable; they keep perfectly well. God knows what other horrors I’ll find in there.” Gwen glanced back towards the cellar door and sighed. “I’m going to sweep up the glass and the rotting vegetables, but Robin is going to have to come up and have a look. Can you telephone him?”
Mabel turned the mass of dough into a basin, threw a dish cloth over it, and wiped her hands on her apron.
“I heard him and his noisy tractor up here at the upper orchard not twenty minutes ago.” She pulled on a sweater and sat on the bench in the mud room to thrust her wool-stockinged feet into her wellington boots. “I’ll go up and see if he’ll come look at it. Mother’s napping. You can give the carrots to the pigs.” She pushed open the screen door and called, “Come on, you two!” to the dogs, and set off across the garden towards the orchard.
Gwen watched her sister and the dogs disappearing into the orchard, and took a deep breath. It was early March, and the world was beginning to wake up. There had been four fine days in a row, and the furrows left by Robin’s tractor in the muddy ground from the early spring rains were nearly dry. A few chives had poked out of the soil in the herb garden, and the vegetable garden wanted turning over to ready it for the aged manure they had collected from the two pigs and the chickens. The pigs won’t mind about the date of the carrots, Gwen thought.
She pushed open the door to the root cellar and propped it with a box of apples and got to work. Perching an old apple basket on the shelf below the mess, she began to sweep the dirt, mouldy food, and glass into it. She would decide later whether to rescue the lids or just throw the whole lot away. When she was reasonably sure she’d swept up all the broken glass, she reached into the back for what looked like a large, unbroken chunk of sod, but when she tried to move it she saw that it was a sizeable rock. No wonder the jars had broken! With both hands she slid the rock towards her, and could see the gaping hollow it had left in the dirt ceiling. She felt in her trouser pockets for her flashlight and shone it into the space between the beams. Robin could just put an extra joist in there, she thought, just as a cascade of soil fell into the beam of light.
Gwen, peering closely with her flashlight, felt a wave of horror rise up within her. She stepped back quickly, her hand flying to her mouth as she realized what she was looking at in the encrusted soil, which was stained the colour of dark tea: delicate bones, with shreds of decaying cloth clinging to them. It took a moment to hit home, but when it did, Gwen blanched and staggered uncertainly, clutching the shelves for balance.
The bones were, without a doubt, human.
Copyright © 2017 by Iona Whishaw
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover illustration by Margaret Hanson
Design by Pete Kohut
Editing by Cat London
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Whishaw, Iona, 1948–, author
Death in a darkening mist / Iona Whishaw.
(A Lane Winslow mystery ; #2)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77151-171-1
I. Title.
PS8595.H414D43 2017 C813'.54 C2016-908155-9
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.