A Photographic Death

by Judi Culbertson

  He smiled at her and gave us directions.

  As we were leaving, I remembered the newspaper reporter who had gone to the scene of the accident. “Do you know anything about a James Wattle?”

  “Jimmy? The newsman? Oh, he’s long gone.”

  Why didn’t anyone ever stay in Stratford? “Where did he move to?”

  He couldn’t help the grin that spread across his cheerful, freckled face. “That great pressroom in the sky.”

  “Oh.” Would they say something similar about me, I wondered, as we moved toward the exit. She’s gone to that everlasting tag sale in the clouds?

  Hopefully not for a while.

  AS WE LEFT the center of town and the shelter of huddled buildings, the wind sprang to life. The sky was the smudged gray of ancient white tennis balls, and there was moisture in the air that heralded snow. The always-­present sense that you are in another country far from home grew stronger.

  “I’d forgotten it was winter,” Jane lamented, pressing her fingers against her face to warm them. “Why didn’t I bring gloves? What if we get all the way out here and she’s not even home? We’ll have to walk all the way back.”

  “You have your phone, don’t you? We’ll get a cab.”

  Worchester Cottage was an impressive redbrick house set back from the road, the upstairs portion clad in white stucco with dark beams. None of the homes on this street was old, but they looked expensive, and several had the same brass nameplates in the yard that the Bankses’ did. Because the house had a name, I had been expecting it to be older, with a thatched roof and clinging ivy.

  The glossy black door was flanked by two urns filled with holly, a matching wreath circling the brass knocker.

  “I don’t see any cars,” Jane whispered.

  “There’s a double garage.”

  I saw us then as the person answering the door would, two foreigners in down ski jackets, noses red from the cold, hair in windblown tangles. Would I let us in?

  The woman who answered the door didn’t, at first. Celia Banks was in her sixties, with a snowy white bob and thick bangs. She was pleasant, but spoke to us through a door opened three inches.

  “Can I help you then?”

  As the older messy stranger, I spoke up. “Hi, I’m Delhi Laine and this is my daughter Jane. We’re looking for Celia Banks.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “Not exactly. It’s about something that happened years ago in Bancroft Gardens.”

  She bit at her underlip, trying to remember. “Where are you from?”

  “New York. You were at the park when my little girl went missing. When they thought she drowned.”

  “Oh.” Her head jerked back; a less dignified person might have smacked her forehead. “Come in. You look frozen. A cup of tea will set you right.”

  Celia Banks sat us down at her wooden kitchen table and moved around deliberately, turning the flame on under a kettle and pulling cups from a glass-­fronted cabinet. The kitchen was large and modern, with stainless steel appliances and everything in its place. I marveled at how tidy it was. Amazing that some homes were always ready for unexpected company.

  After a minute Mrs. Banks set a dish of Pepperidge Farm Milanos on the table between us.

  We eyed the cookies greedily. We hadn’t stopped to have lunch. I could have scarfed down the plateful, but delicately took a single cookie. Jane did the same.

  “Milk with your tea?”

  “Oh—­yes, please.” I didn’t usually take anything in tea, but milk was a food group.

  When the table was arranged to Celia Banks’s satisfaction, she sat down.

  Settling herself to get comfortable, she said, “I do remember that awful day, of course. I had walked down to the park to read by the river, it was so pleasant there. Everything in bloom, you know. I often did that when my boys were away at camp, and I had seen you there before.” She smiled at me. “You were such a creative mum.”

  I laughed.

  “Those little girls were always dressed in such interesting clothes!”

  “I let them pick out what they wanted to wear.” What I remembered were the endless loads of laundry, the constantly dwindling pile that they chose their play clothes from.

  “And you’ve grown up to be so pretty,” she told Jane. Then she added to me, “I did wonder how you managed so well with all those little ones and you being in the family way again. I couldn’t have done it.”

  “It was a struggle,” I admitted. “We came to ask about something you might have seen that afternoon. I know it was years ago, but did you notice a nanny with a plaid stroller?”

  “A nanny.” She closed her eyes as if trying to carry herself back. “You know, I might have. But I don’t remember anything about her. The police never asked me about the other ­people in the park. When it happened there was so much confusion, they took our names and said they would get back to us later. I was surprised when they did.”

  “You were interviewed by Constable Donnelly?”

  “Yes, he was the one. A nice boy. Grew up right around here.”

  “He was a boy?” Jane blurted.

  “Oh, just a lad then. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen. He went off to university soon after, somewhere near London. I was glad to see him making something of himself.”

  “So he wasn’t married?”

  “Oh, my goodness, no.”

  The image of Constable Donnelly and his wife, desperate for a child and dressing her up like a nanny to kidnap one, faded into the cabinetry.

  It was time to tell Jane’s story.

  Chapter Twenty

  WHEN JANE FINISHED explaining what she had remembered in Dr. Lundy’s office, Celia Banks sat back and looked at us. “That’s quite a tale.”

  It was okay if she didn’t believe it—­Colin, Patience, and DCI Sampson didn’t either—­but I said, “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think. It would certainly turn everything on its ear.”

  And that was all she could say. She had nothing to add to the story about Priscilla Waters either; she had never known her personally. “We didn’t see many plays in those days with the children so active. I don’t think they ever found the car responsible for the hit-­and-­run. If the police knew why she was out walking in the countryside at night, they didn’t say.”

  “What do you think of DCI Sampson?”

  “Gabe Sampson? What should I think? Dedicated to his job, I know. He never married. He lived with his mother until she passed.” She lifted her eyes as if consulting an old newspaper. “That was almost four years ago.”

  “I guess he’s been here a long time.”

  “Came up through the ranks,” she agreed.

  I pushed back from the table. “We’ve taken a lot of your time.” And your cookies. The plate looked pathetic with only one Milano left.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “The White Swan.”

  “Brilliant! Did you drive here?”

  “No, we walked. It was fine.”

  Jane looked at me.

  “It must have been dreadfully cold, hardly a comfortable day. I have to call in at the chemist’s; I’m going right down Rother Street. I’ll drop you.”

  “That would be wonderful.” At the memory of the cutting wind, I was beyond protestations.

  Driving into town, Celia Banks told us that her husband was a solicitor in Birmingham and her two sons were long-­grown, but living nearby. She wished us good luck with our search, then added, “Have you been to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage?”

  We assured her we would go soon.

  “Let’s get something to eat,” I said as we entered the lobby.

  Jane nodded. “Cookies only go so far.”

  We stopped in the room to leave our coats and wash up. While Jane w
as using the bathroom, I turned on my iPad and connected with my e-­mail. Comments from BookEm.com, my online dealers’ group, two book orders, and one odd note.

  Signed “Will’s Boy,” it read: Neither a borrower nor a meddler be.

  Was this some kind of local advertising? The Internet knew exactly where you were and what you might need. Or had someone noticed our poster? The change of the word “lender” to “meddler” seemed too intrusive for an ad.

  WHEN JANE CAME out again, patting down her hair, I showed her the message.

  “Did you write back?”

  “Not yet.” I was trying to think of another quote from Hamlet with which to respond, but my memory was failing me.

  “Just ask him what he knows.”

  “Okay.” Quickly I typed in, Do you have information for us?

  The reply was instantaneous. When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurly-­burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.

  “What’s he talking about?” Jane demanded. She had no patience for the whimsical.

  “It’s what the witches say at the opening of Macbeth. I don’t like that he knows there are two of us though. It’s as if we’re being watched.”

  “Maybe he saw us putting up a poster.”

  “We did those separately.”

  “Oh—­right. What are you going to answer?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? I thought we wanted to find out what he knows!”

  “We do, but he’s playing with us. Let’s see what he suggests.”

  We waited for several minutes, then were overcome with hunger and went downstairs to the dining room. By now it would serve as an early dinner.

  It wasn’t until we were halfway through our shepherd’s pie that I thought of something else we needed to do and looked at my watch. “Damn! I wanted to get back to the archives, but they closed at four-­thirty.”

  “The place where we were?”

  “Same building. We need to look at the playbills from twenty years ago and compare them with current ones. See if there’s anyone still with the company who was there when Priscilla Waters was. Someone who can tell us more about her.”

  If we showed them my photograph could they identify her—­or not—­all these years later?

  “Great idea. Maybe they’ll know what really happened to her.”

  “And maybe what happened to Caitlin afterward.” That worry had never left me. Another thought then, so horrifying that the fork slipped out of my fingers. “What if Cate was with her when she was run down? What if they hit her too?” My voice veered into the danger zone. “She was so little.”

  “Easy, Mom. They didn’t find her there. They would have said.”

  “Would they? They don’t seem to tell anybody anything.”

  “Newspapers have other ways of finding things out.”

  “I guess.”

  “Now you’re into the conspiracy theory?”

  “No. But if she wasn’t with Priscilla, she had to be somewhere.”

  “Maybe she was with the husband.”

  “The paper didn’t say she was married.”

  “It didn’t say she wasn’t.”

  “That’s why we have to find someone who knew her,” I said.

  “First thing tomorrow morning.”

  But I hated to wait until then. I thought about going to the stage door and accosting actors as they left after the performance though I knew that was not the right way to do it. And what about Will’s Boy? All we’d put on the poster was that we were looking to reunite with family members. Yet he characterized it as “meddling.” Didn’t that mean he knew something?

  “Time here is too precious to waste,” I complained.

  “Well, the Christmas Market’s open late tonight and it’s only a ­couple blocks away. We could do our shopping.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was trying to distract me or was anxious to see the market herself. The idea of wandering around and looking at stalls filled with things I cared nothing about had zero appeal for me. “You go. I want to read.”

  “Maybe I will later.”

  WE HAD BEEN back in our room, a fire in the grate, for about an hour. I’d been sitting in one of the comfortable chairs reading The Cairo Trilogy and Jane had been lying on the bed, dozing. Now she was in the bathroom getting ready to go out when her phone on the night table beeped with a message.

  Was it from Hannah? No reason to think that, except that Jane hadn’t mentioned hearing from Hannah since this morning. I knew that looking at someone else’s texts was uncomfortably close to reading a diary, but I moved out of my chair, picked up the phone on the bed, and looked down at the screen.

  It was from Colin.

  U go back to the police yet?

  I pressed the suddenly red-­hot device back onto the nightstand and was in my chair when Jane returned.

  I glanced at her, then back at the book. Naguib Mahfouz’s words became unreadable. Jane was reporting everything we found out to Colin. No wonder she kept wanting to go back to the police station, he was pushing her to do so. I tried to rationalize away my feeling of betrayal, but couldn’t. Even if I placed her communication in the best possible light, that he was, after all, her father, that maybe she thought by keeping him involved he would come around, I still couldn’t stop feeling betrayed.

  This was our quest.

  I put the book facedown in my lap and watched Jane pull on her powder blue jacket.

  She caught my gaze and smiled. “Sure you don’t want to come? Bet you haven’t finished your shopping.”

  I couldn’t say anything.

  “Mom? What’s wrong?”

  “You had a new message.”

  “Oh.” She moved over and picked up her phone, glanced at it, and snapped it shut.

  I was beyond coyness. “You’re texting Dad everything we’re finding out.”

  She didn’t bother with How dare you look at my phone. She wasn’t even defensive. “So? He wants to know.”

  “You know he’ll block us any way he can.”

  “Why do you think that? He’s just being careful.”

  “He’s afraid it will disrupt his life.”

  She finished zipping her jacket. “Hers too. But it’s not that he’s working against us.” A stern look. “That’s really paranoid—­you know?”

  I shrugged and turned my book back over, too embarrassed to explain the rest of what I was feeling. Jane had always seemed closer to Colin, partly by temperament and partly because he made it so. This trip to England was the first time she and I had done something alone and I had been relishing our intimacy. But Colin had even managed to be here.

  “I won’t be long.”

  “Have fun.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  IT WAS TIME to check my iPad for e-­mails again, as I had been doing every twenty minutes. There was another volley of messages from BookEm.com, mostly lists of books other dealers were offering for sale, and a query about mailing books to Russia. Ads from Amazon and L.L. Bean—­and an e-­mail from Will’s Boy.

  I went to that first. Nothing else mattered.

  Meet me at the Christmas Market. First clue: If music be the food of love, play on.

  First clue?

  I typed back What kind of music?

  My kind.

  Was there entertainment at the market? It was the time of year for carols. In my mind I saw a stringed group playing “Greensleeves” or “The Holly and the Ivy” on a small platform, shoppers sleepwalking in front of them. I’d wait there until Will’s Boy came up to me.

  I tried tamping down my excitement, but couldn’t help fumbling with my jacket zipper. Could we really be about to find Caitlin? I wasn’t sure why he was making it into a game, but I didn’t care. Maybe he had gr
own up with Caitlin right here in Stratford.

  Be still, my heart.

  Outside the hotel it was even colder but the world was ablaze. Fir trees everywhere were outlined with strings of red and white bulbs, garlands with large stars in the center were strung across the streets. Even if I had not known how to get to Henley Street, I would only have needed to follow the crush of ­people headed in one direction.

  When I stepped onto Henley Street, the Christmas Market seemed to stretch out forever, booths under blue-­and-­white striped awnings on one side and stands with separate blue-­and-­yellow umbrellas on the other. I paused, able to see my breath in the freezing air, and tried to hear the music. But though I could smell the burnt meaty odor of roasting chestnuts, and blinked at the lights, which seemed to be in competition as to which could shine brightest, I could pick out nothing but the cries of voices around me.

  I was only at the beginning, I told myself. Maybe the music was softer and playing farther down.

  The stalls I passed displayed expensive leather purses, hand-­knitted scarves, mittens, and gourmet foodstuffs. Keeping to the center of Henley Street, I tried to avoid the clog of serious shoppers eager to fill their bags. I didn’t let myself think that maybe this treasure hunt was only a cruel joke, a way for someone to have a bit of fun.

  Then I saw a display of antique instruments, mandolins, flutes, and miniature keyboards ahead on my right. Will’s kind of music? Dubiously I edged over until I was directly in front of a man in a tweed cap with a pleasant grizzled face.

  “Can I interest you in a French lute, ducky?”

  It was impossible not to laugh. “Maybe. I’m supposed to be meeting somebody, but I’m not sure who.”

  “Ah.” He reached under the wooden table, pulled out an envelope, and handed it to me. “I think this is what you want.”

  “Really?” I took out the paper inside and read it aloud. “Then heigh-­ho the holly. This life is most jolly.”

  “As You Like It,” he said.

  “But what does it mean?”

  “Why not go to a booth that sells Christmas wreaths. Down another street.”

  Was everyone in on this game?