St. Cuthbert’s was a bright, airy place with the most thoughtful and attentive staff anyone could hope for, and certainly a huge improvement upon his mother’s dreary existence at Kerry Hill. He had come to know two or three of the nurses who were competent and kind. The most senior of them, Nurse Watkins, was responsible for implementing day-to-day medical decisions regarding his mother’s “palliative care.” After three weeks here, Susannah Hughes-English was reaching the end. Don caught Nurse Watkins as she left the reception area.
“Oh, hello Don, m’love. How’s your mother today?”
“Comfortable,” Don replied. “She’s been singing along with songs from the sixties again.”
“That’s nice,” Nurse Watkins replied. “Does she need anything?” Her caring blue eyes and that wonderfully lilting Welsh accent always made Don feel better about this whole sad ordeal.
“I don’t think so, but thanks. I’m just going to find some coffee, and I’ll stay until eight.”
“Right you are, m’love,” the veteran nurse said, and gave Don’s burly forearm a comforting squeeze before setting off on her rounds.
The machine in reception produced a highly caffeinated, dark-brown liquid that brazenly masqueraded as coffee. It would keep him awake, at least. The atmosphere at St. Cuthbert’s was pleasant and carefully maintained. Most of the conversations were hushed and private. Doors were closed quietly, and sometimes it felt as much like a small town public library as a hospice. Don reminded himself that this was not the emergency room or even a conventional hospital. No one would be rushed in for treatment and few resuscitation attempts would ever be made. This place, he knew full well, would be the final stop on his mother’s long journey.
He sat in the reception area for a few minutes until his coffee was cool enough to drink. A woman about his own age sat opposite him, her fingers quietly drumming on the leather handbag in her lap. She wore sunglasses and was dressed expensively enough to stand out.
“Waiting for someone?” Don asked. “A ride?”
She nodded. “My husband. We’ve been here all day.” It had not, quite clearly, been an easy one.
“You’ll be ready to get home, I imagine,” he said.
“As soon as he’s finished the paperwork.” She glanced around, but there was still no sign of him. “It’s mad that they don’t allow smoking in here,” she said, her fingers continuing their drumming on the leather. “I mean, it’s not as if…” She left the thought unsaid. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no,” Don said. “I heard an old guy, maybe a week ago, pleading with the nurse for a cigarette, but she just recited the rules and regulations at him.”
“Seems cruel to me,” the woman said. “Just give them what they want, I say.”
Don was always wary of asking personal questions, but he wanted to think about something other than his own impending loss. “Is it one of your parents?” he asked. “I mean, who you’re visiting?”
“My husband’s father. He passed this morning.” She stated it as a fact, with little obvious emotion.
“I’m sorry,” Don said. But then, he felt the need to fill the awkward silence that followed. He sipped the brown plastic cup of coffee and asked, “Had he been ill for long?”
“Alzheimer’s,” the woman said, the single word summing up a decade of struggle and sadness. “A blessing, in the end. You know?”
Don nodded. “My mother is here. Bone cancer,” he said, the words feeling harsh and unwelcome as always, “but her dementia has become a lot more advanced recently. Doesn’t remember anything from the last few years.”
“But her memories from fifty years ago are clear as a bell, right?” the woman speculated.
“Right,” Don said. “She can still sing all the old song lyrics, but she forgets where she is. I had to move her from where she was living.”
“Where was that?” the woman asked, the distraction of conversation a relief after this long, trying day.
“Kerry Hill,” Don replied. “The hospital there.”
The woman seemed to recognize the name. “For long?”
“I suppose you could say that,” he sighed. “Since 1979.”
Don couldn’t make out her eyes behind the sunglasses, but her body language seemed vaguely sympathetic. A moment later, her husband arrived, looking red-eyed and pale. “Okay, dear. We’ve done everything we need to,” he said, his tired whisper only adding to the subdued atmosphere. She stood and graciously shook Don’s hand before leaving.
He finished the dreadful coffee before it could cool any further and returned to his mother’s room. She was snoozing, but the armchair squeaked as he sat, and she woke. She looked at him, blinking over and over. “Don!” she grinned. “My sweet boy. Where did you come from?”
He was learning to let these comments go. “How was your nap, Mum?” he asked instead, taking her hand again.
“You know,” she said, “I wish your father could be here. He’s so busy.” She shook her head slightly. “Busy, busy, busy.”
Again, Don held his tongue. He could have reminded his mother that his real father had walked out on them over forty years before, but he knew she meant that self-serving old crook, Sir Thomas Hughes, her second husband, the man she had insisted he call “father.”
“He was such a good sailor,” Susannah said, out of nowhere.
“Yes, Mum,” Don said. He was used to these non sequiturs, part of a fragmented commentary on the home movies playing in his mother’s ailing mind. Three weeks ago, she was still remembering recent events, but now, the only memories that surfaced were those from her earlier life, the seventies and before. It would not be much longer before she would forget who Don was. The thought made him shiver.
“The Gypsy Dancer,” Susannah recalled. “Thirty-six feet long. Our home for two wonderful weeks.”
“Where did you go, Mum?” Don asked. The nurses said that it was good to keep her talking during these more lucid moments.
“All over,” she said with a gleeful little laugh. “Mexico and Jamaica, lots of little reefs and inlets. Two weeks and then back to San Marcos.” She sighed and her eyes grew misty. “We were inseparable back then. Before everything.”
Don frowned. His mother seldom mentioned her relationship with Sir Thomas Hughes. Their marriage had deteriorated badly enough to prompt a serious nervous breakdown back when Don was a teenager. He had barely spoken to the industrialist again after Thomas’s decision to commit Susannah to an “in-patient care facility.” Don knew what the place truly was: somewhere for the broken-minded to be kept safe and in a small minority of fortunate cases, nursed back to health.
But the bumbling of the doctors and the grim, hopeless atmosphere had made his mother’s mental state worse, and apart from two disastrous attempts at “care in the community,” she had made her home there, right up until her final transfer to St. Cuthbert’s.
“Before what, Mum?” he asked.
“He was always busy, busy, busy,” she said again. “Meetings and traveling and managing his factories. You know,” she continued with obvious pride in her second husband, “he built four factories from nothing.” She held up four pale, slender fingers. “Just like that!” she marveled. “Thousands of people. All depending on him. Busy, busy, busy.”
Don decided that silence was the most prudent option. He had never felt anything but hatred for Thomas. Not only had the man condemned his second wife to an asylum, but he’d also wrecked Don’s life. As an angry, sidelined stepson, he was banished to the care of his elderly maternal grandparents. Life with them had been tedious and limited. He had felt like a burden.
His grandparents were uneducated and could barely read. They lacked their daughter’s enthusiasm for art and travel. Thomas granted Don a stipend, but it dwindled to a pittance that ensured that Don would have no college degree nor any of the world adventures that were Susannah’s dearest wish for her son.
He held his mother’s hand and let her carry on, her hoarse little whisper
almost painful to hear, but it was far better than what would come later. Don dreaded even the idea of that final silence and pushed the thought away every time.
“Sometimes he wouldn’t get up from his desk until two or three in the morning,” Susannah was saying. She tapped Don’s hand with deliberate fingertips. “Writing and thinking and planning. Hardly ever had time for me. Busy, busy, busy. I wish he’d come to see me,” she said again.
Don didn’t remind his mother that Sir Thomas had succumbed to a heart attack eighteen months before. Instead, he reached for something to say. “You were good to him, Mum. A good wife.” Sir Thomas had had a complex, busy life, and Don knew that his mother had tried her best to be a good partner through eight difficult years.
But Thomas Hughes had been no Husband of the Year, that was for certain. What man who truly loved his wife would have her committed? His mother had been a gentle, sweet, kind person, and Don, while he didn’t know for sure, always believed that Sir Thomas had done something to anger her, some transgression or lie that served to corrode her already fragile mind to the point where it snapped. On his darkest days, Don imagined Sir Thomas tormenting her, berating her, forcing her closer to the edge, and then calling for the “men in the white coats” once he’d finally tired of her despairing, tearful complaints.
“I used to watch him, you know,” Susannah said after a pause. Her blue eyes twinkled a little now, framed by neatly combed, soft white locks.
“Watch him?” Don asked, at a loss once more.
“At his desk. That lovely antique desk he bought himself when his third factory opened. He used to sit there,” she assured Don, “until two or three in the morning.”
“Yes, Mum,” Don sighed. “You said.”
“He loved reading that letter.” She paused and turned to her son with an earnest expression. “You know, don’t you? Thomas read it over and over,” Susannah recalled, “but always in secret. He made me promise.”
“Promise what, Mum?” Don said. “What did the letter say?”
“It was beautifully written,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard the question. “Thomas was so proud to receive it. He never believed all the terrible things people said. There was a photo of the three of us, on the beach. Summer of seventy-two, it was. I wanted to frame it and hang it on the wall, but Thomas said I couldn’t. Oh, the color of the water.” Her eyes glazed over once more. “I adored that shimmering blue. Always so warm.” She sighed. “So warm.”
Don was racing to catch up, fearful that this moment of lucidity and revelation would pass all too quickly. “Where were you, Mum?” he asked. “Were you on your honeymoon?” he guessed.
But his mother was hazy-eyed, dwelling in her own memories. “Long, lazy days,” she recalled with a sigh. “Just the three of us, and his servants. They caught big, tropical fish off the stern and grilled them for us on the deck.”
Servants?
“You said there were three of you in the photos. Who was the third person, Mum?”
Susannah shook off the daydream and frowned at Don as though he’d forgotten his own name. “From San Marcos, silly!” she said. “He was so charming. And so very handsome in his uniform,” Susannah added wistfully. “‘A strong and wise man’, your father used to say. Thomas always hid that letter in its own little box inside his desk. Secret, secret, secret.” She tailed off, her eyes beginning to close again.
Don was desperate to know more. This letter and the scene his mother described intrigued him. There was obviously an important friendship between Thomas and this wealthy, uniformed individual that they had met in Central America. But who was he? And why should it be so very secret? “Mum, listen to me. Where is the box now?”
Her eyes opened just a fraction. “Hmm?” she said, her voice tiny and plaintive.
“The letter, Mum,” he spelled out, more loudly. “Where did Thomas hide it? Is it in his desk, still?”
But she was sinking back into sleep. Don stared at her for a long moment, hoping she might jolt back to wakefulness, but he knew his mother would have no memory of this fragmented conversation when she woke up. He took out his cellphone and quickly wrote himself a note, including all the details he could remember.
Nurse Watkins appeared at the door just as he was returning the phone to his pocket. She looked kindly at Susannah and moved to pull the covers up over the frail old woman’s shoulders a little more. “Has she been talking much?” the nurse asked quietly.
“Yes, a little,” Don said. “But just fragments. Bits and pieces. I’ve been trying to make sense of it, but…”
Nurse Watkins nodded. “It’s nearly eight, m’love, and you’ve been here all day. Why not get some rest? She’s in good hands.”
Don rubbed his eyes and gave her a grateful smile. “She is,” he agreed. “The best hands.” He kissed his mother’s forehead once more, and then turned down the bedside lights before leaving her room.
As he walked across the rain-soaked parking lot to his battered old VW, as he drove down the quiet A282, and for the rest of the evening, Don English thought about Thomas Hughes and his writing desk. “Who was that other person, Mum?” he asked the walls of his living room. There was no reply, but still, he asked the most pressing of questions: “Why did this letter have to remain so secret?”
Unable to sleep, he went for a walk just after midnight, his scuffed brown shoes splashing slightly in the puddles on his neighborhood’s sidewalks. “Secret, secret, secret.” He could hear her saying those words, repeating them, almost like an invitation for him to find out more.
Back at home, he set his alarm for the next morning but then sat in his old armchair in the living room, sipping a glass of cheap whiskey. He finally went to bed sometime after two o’clock, drained by events and bothered by his mother’s cryptic reminiscences. But then, he concluded as he drifted off to sleep, her mind had become little more than a dizzied, fragmented maze. Perhaps she was confusing and mixing up events, or even making up parts of the story…
His phone woke him just after four. “Mr. English? It’s Nurse Watkins.”
He was bolt upright in seconds. “What’s happened?” he asked. But he knew the answer, even before the nurse’s kindly, Welsh voice confirmed it.
“I’m so sorry, m’love. It was just ten minutes ago. She slipped away in her sleep.”
To get your copy of The Case of the Missing Letter visit the link below:
http://cozymysteries.com/missing-letter
THANK YOU
Thank you for taking the time to read The Case of the Broken Doll. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend and very much appreciated.
Thank you,
OTHER BOOKS IN THE INSPECTOR DAVID GRAHAM SERIES
The Case of the Screaming Beauty (Prequel)
The Case of the Hidden Flame
The Case of the Fallen Hero
The Case of the Missing Letter
ALSO BY ALISON GOLDEN
FEATURING REVEREND ANNABELLE DIXON
Death at the Café (Prequel)
Murder at the Mansion
Body in the Woods
Grave in the Garage
Horror in the Highlands
FEATURING DIANA HUNTER
Hunted (Prequel)
Snatched
Stolen
Chopped
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alison Golden was born and raised in Bedfordshire, England. She writes cozy mysteries and suspense novels, along with the occasional witty blog post, all of which are designed to entertain, amuse, and calm. Her approach is to combine creative ideas with excellent writing and edit, edit, edit.
She is the creator of the Reverend Annabelle Dixon cozy mysteries, a charming, fun series featuring a female vicar ministering in the beautiful county of Cornwall, England. She also produces a Jersey-based detective series featuring Inspector David Graham and the Diana Hunter series, set in Vancouver.
Her books’ themes range from the humorous and sweet to harder hitting suspense. They are recommended for readers who like to relax and unwind with their books, who enjoy getting to know the characters, and who prefer the tougher side of life implied.
She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and twin sons. She splits her time traveling between London and San Francisco.
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For more information:
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[email protected]
THE CASE OF THE BROKEN DOLL
An Inspector David Graham Mystery
A missing girl. A broken doll. Dark, dark secrets.
Ten years ago, schoolgirl Beth Ridley disappeared from the streets of Gorey, Jersey.
As news of her disappearance swept the town, a search commenced. Family, law enforcement, and townspeople alike combed land and sea for any sign of the teenager.
But there was no trace, save for the leg of her doll left in the street.
Now, on the anniversary of her disappearance, Detective Inspector Graham is taking another look at the case. His Sherlockian tendencies are set alight.
What he finds will rock the town, stirring memories many wish were left forgotten as truths far darker than anyone could imagine are revealed.
The Case of the Broken Doll (An Inspector David Graham Cozy Mystery Book 4) Page 17