Bessie and Doona exchanged looks. Everyone did know that Anne’s husband, Jack, had trouble holding a job. The only thing that Jack held down successfully was the third bar stool from the left in The Cat and Longtail pub in downtown Laxey. He’d been a fixture there since the place opened in the nineteen-eighties. He’d get odd jobs here and there, whenever Anne put her foot down, but it was never long before he was turning up to work drunk if he bothered to turn up at all.
“Anyway,” Anne continued, “for the first few months we assumed I’d find something else fairly quickly, but it turns out no one is looking for a middle-aged woman without even a single O-level to her name. After a while, we started to try to cut back on our expenses, and we started selling whatever we could, but we’d always pretty much lived from month to month. We didn’t have any savings and not much of value to sell. By February we’d run out of money and couldn’t pay Moirrey.”
Bessie shook her head. “You should have come and talked to me,” she told the woman. “I would have helped you somehow.”
Anne shrugged. “I don’t know what you could have done,” she said sadly. “But I appreciate the offer.”
Bessie kept silent. She had been fortunate to receive an inheritance in her youth that had allowed her to buy her small cottage and make a few cautious investments. Her advocate, Doncan Quayle, had acted as her financial advisor, something at which, it turned out, he was quite proficient. Bessie had never had to find paid employment; instead she had been able to live relatively comfortably within her small income in her tiny cottage, which she was able to extend twice, thanks to her advocate’s moneymaking talents.
Her only real extravagance, aside from her home, had always been books. After years of watching every penny and rationing her purchases, she had found herself a relatively wealthy woman in recent years. For her, the very definition of wealth was being able to go to the local bookstore and buy whatever she fancied without worrying about the prices.
She definitely could have helped Anne Caine with her financial difficulties, as she occasionally helped others in the small and close-knit community. Her only stipulation, when she did help, was that the recipients of her kindness not tell anyone from where their assistance had come. The last thing Bessie wanted was everyone on the island talking about her generosity.
“So what happens now?” Doona asked.
“I guess I need to move,” Anne said sadly. “I’ve no idea where I’ll go, or how I’ll afford anything else, though.”
“Didn’t you say something to Moirrey about only needing another week to get the money together?” Marjorie asked.
“I did,” Anne agreed, “but I was lying. I was just hoping that that woman might give me just a little bit more time. I am working two jobs, but neither one pays much of anything. There’s no way I can find a thousand pounds in a week. My only hope was Jack. He’s across trying to find Andy to see if he can help us out. Andy’s been living across for five years and we’re hoping he’s doing well enough to loan us some money.”
“So Jack didn’t go over to find work?” Bessie asked.
Anne laughed hollowly. “Jack? Work? After all these years of sponging off of me, why on earth would he start working now?”
“So that he doesn’t lose his home?” Doona suggested.
“He’ll tell you that the cottage has never really been ‘his’ home,” she sighed. “I’ve lived there my entire life, but he claims he’s always felt like an intruder there. I don’t know, maybe he shouldn’t even bother coming back to the island now.”
“I suppose Moirrey is still using Mr. Barnes for her legal affairs?” Bessie checked.
“Yes, at least that’s who keeps sending the threatening letters.”
“I shall have young Doncan get in touch with him first thing in the morning, then. If the agreement between your father and Moirrey’s isn’t fair then it shouldn’t be legally binding. Moirrey is about to find that she has a fight on her hands.”
Anne shook her head. “I appreciate the idea,” she said, “but young Doncan Quayle’s father is the man who drew up the original agreement between my father and Moirrey’s. I don’t know what was in the original, but it might not have been any fairer than the second one. I can’t see young Doncan battling against something his own father set into place.”
“You might be surprised,” Bessie answered. “Young Doncan didn’t always see eye to eye with his father when it came to the ethical side of the law. He might well relish a chance to right old wrongs committed by his father.”
“Sorry,” Doona interrupted, “but how many Doncan Quayles are there?”
Bessie laughed. “Three. Doncan James Quayle was the first Doncan. His father, William, was actually my first advocate on the island, but he died young, not long after his son was called to the bar. Doncan James had one son, whom he also named Doncan, but he called him Doncan William, so he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a junior. Doncan William is now known as Doncan Quayle, Sr., but I still tend to think of him as ‘young Doncan.’ Young Doncan also has a son, whom he called Doncan William, Junior. Junior is in his mid-twenties and working towards his law degree. Young Doncan, who is at least fifty, is my advocate now, and he’s a lovely man.”
Donna nodded. “I think I get it,” she said uncertainly.
“I think young Doncan can really help,” Bessie told Anne again.
Anne shrugged. “If you think he can help,” she said with a sigh, “I guess we can try. I can’t afford to pay him for his time, though.”
Bessie waved that away. “I’m sure Doncan will defer his fee until everything is straightened up and you’re back on your feet again,” she said. And if he won’t, I’ll pay the fee myself, she added silently.
After that the foursome got busy. Bessie washed and dried cups and plates and Marjorie carefully put them away while Doona walked through the room with a duster and Anne ran the vacuum through the space.
“I don’t have to do the rest of the building,” Anne told them when they’d finished. “Really, Kate just gave me this job because she feels sorry for me.”
Kate Christian ran the organisation that owned the small building.
“One more thing, and then we can go,” Bessie said, sitting down at one of the desks. “Do you pay Moirrey the loan money directly or do you pay it through someone else?”
“I pay Moirrey directly, why?” Anne asked.
Bessie reached into her bag and pulled out her chequebook. She wrote carefully for a moment and then tore out and handed a cheque to Anne. “There’s a cheque for Moirrey for fifteen hundred pounds. That covers February, March and April, so you have a little extra time to get caught up before your next payment is due at the end of May,” she explained to a bewildered-looking Anne.
“But I can’t take this,” Anne stammered.
“Of course you can,” Bessie told her. “Take it to Moirrey first thing tomorrow and tell her to stop making threats.”
“But according to the agreement, she doesn’t have to take the cheque,” Anne argued. “I’ve already failed to keep my side of the agreement.”
“She’ll take it,” Bessie told her. “Or she’ll have to answer to me and my advocate. You’d better believe she isn’t going to want to do that.”
Anne looked uncertain, but she didn’t argue any further. Instead, they all made their way out of the building. Anne locked the door behind them and walked to her old compact car. Marjorie climbed into her own estate car that was always filled with boxes full of paper, and the two were already pulling away by the time Bessie and Doona were safely buckled up into Doona’s two-year-old mid-sized auto.
“That was awfully nice of you,” Doona said to Bessie as they made their way out of the car park.
“I wasn’t about to let Anne lose her house,” Bessie answered. “That child has had a hard enough life.”
“Go on then, tell me everything,” Doona demanded.
Bessie grinned. “You know I don’t usually gossip,” she told Doon
a. “But, as Anne said, there aren’t any secrets on this island. You would know the story if you had been smart enough to live in Laxey your whole life.”
Doona laughed. “I suppose I should apologise for my parents’ bad judgment,” she said.
“Indeed,” Bessie shot back. “Although I’m not sure Laxey has been so good for Anne Caine.”
“Go on then, tell me the whole story. Start with how Anne messed up her own future.”
“She did that in the most common way,” Bessie replied. “She got pregnant at sixteen. Her own mother had died in childbirth and, while her father, Robert, did his best to bring her up well, she really needed her mother. Mrs. Teare was the closest thing she had to a mother figure and she was, well, not especially maternal, at least not until Moirrey came along. And after that, Moirrey absorbed pretty much one hundred percent of Mrs. Teare’s time and attention.”
“I didn’t realise Anne even had children,” Doona said.
“Just the one,” Bessie replied. “And Andy couldn’t wait to turn eighteen and get off the island. He quit school as soon as he could and then worked every odd job he could find and saved every penny until he had enough saved to fund a move to London. That must have been five years ago, and as far as I know he’s never been back, not even to visit.”
“It sounds like he’s not afraid of a little hard work, at least. Not like his father.”
“Yes and no,” Bessie sighed. “From what I’ve heard, he didn’t make a lot of effort at school or help out at home. He was only motivated when he decided he was leaving.”
“With that father of his, it’s hardly surprising he wanted to get away,” Doona said. “Do you know every time I went in The Cat and Longtail Jack Caine tried to chat me up? From what I’ve heard, he tried to sleep with every woman who walked in the place and a few who were just strolling past. I don’t reckon he had much luck, though. He isn’t exactly an attractive man, is he?”
“You should have seen him in his younger days,” Bessie told her. “When he was eighteen he had all the girls running after him.”
“And he chose Anne?” Doona asked incredulously. “I mean, she’s a really nice woman, but even in the first flush of youth she couldn’t have been all that beautiful.”
Bessie laughed. “No, she was never beautiful. I don’t think Jack chose her as much as tried to get together with every single girl he met. He was just unfortunate that Anne was the one who ended up pregnant. There weren’t as many options in those days for unexpected pregnancies, of course. The story goes that Anne’s father and Ewan Teare got together and went to see Jack. Apparently he wasn’t given a whole lot of choice in the matter, but then again, neither was Anne.”
“So they’ve been unhappily married ever since?” Doona asked.
“Indeed,” Bessie replied. “Although I don’t know that they were all that unhappy, at least in the beginning. When Andy was small and Ewan Teare and Robert Hall were both still alive, Anne and her little family seemed to be doing okay. It was only after Ewan passed away that money seemed to start to be an issue. I’m not sure what exactly was going on over there, though. The Teares have always fiercely guarded their privacy.”
“That can’t have been popular on an island that thrives on skeet,” Doona laughed.
“Everyone had their own opinions about the family, and I doubt they’ve stopped talking about them even now, when Moirrey is the only one left.”
Doona nodded. “Someone called in a couple of weeks ago to report seeing lights on in the old Teare house. We sent a patrol over but they didn’t find anything suspicious. But why doesn’t Moirrey live there anymore?”
“That’s one of the big questions that everyone would love an answer to,” Bessie told her. “All she’s ever said is that the house is too large for her, especially with her heart condition. She claims she can’t be going up and down all those stairs all day.”
“And what do you think is the real reason?” Doona asked.
“Money, or lack of it,” Bessie answered. “I don’t think dear old Ewan left his only daughter as well off as everyone seems to think. I can’t imagine she’s happy living in one of the former servants’ cottages while her grand mansion sits empty, I just don’t think she can afford to run the big house. I think that’s part of why she’s pushing Anne so hard. She needs the quarter of a million pounds.”
“I would rather think she just a nasty person,” Doona laughed.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” Bessie assured her. “She is a very nasty person, too, but in this case I think there’s more going on than just nastiness. And I’m sure Mr. Barnes has a hand in the trouble between Anne and Moirrey as well; he simply must.”
“Oh yes, what’s the story with him?” Doona asked. “I’ve never heard you mention him and I certainly didn’t know how badly you dislike him.”
Bessie sighed. By now they had pulled up in front of her small cottage and were sitting with the engine running. “If we’re going to talk about him, you’d better come in for bit,” she told Doona. “It’s a long story.”
Doona shook her head. “It’s half-ten already,” she said. “As much as I hate to say it, I need to get home and get my beauty sleep. I’ve got to be to work at seven tomorrow.”
“Oh dear,” Bessie answered. “I didn’t realise that. Off you go.”
Doona insisted on seeing Bessie safely inside her small cottage. Bessie stood patiently in her small kitchen as Doona rushed through the cottage, checking for hidden intruders.
“Okay, you’re good,” Doona said as she came back down the stairs and through the kitchen.
“There was never any doubt in my mind about that,” Bessie told her.
Doona opened her mouth to reply, but then snapped it shut.
Bessie thanked her profusely for the ride back and forth to class before Doona headed home.
In her little cottage, Bessie carefully locked her doors, a precaution she was far more careful about in the last month or so. She grabbed her latest mystery novel from the small side table in the sitting room where she had been reading it before Doona arrived to take her to class.
Upstairs, she changed into her nightgown and brushed her teeth and hair. She studied her face in the mirror after she washed it. She had been told more than once that she had been beautiful in her youth and she figured she wasn’t holding up too badly.
She kept her grey hair cut short, and the style suited her face. Her eyes had always been grey and while they had often seemed to fade into the background when her hair had been darker, they seemed to have become the focal point of her face now that they matched her hair. She had always had perfect vision and now only needed reading glasses, although she could usually get by without them if she absolutely needed to.
She smiled at herself in the mirror and took herself off to bed. She read just one more chapter in the her book and then, with more self-discipline than she usually had when it came to reading, she forced herself to turn off the light and get some sleep.
Tuesday morning saw her up at six as normal, in spite of her late night. She showered and then patted herself all over with her favourite rose-scented dusting powder. It was an old-fashioned habit, in today’s world teeming with designer perfumes, but she had never found any perfume that could match the scent of the powder she loved so much. Matthew, the man she had loved and lost before her eighteenth birthday, had always given her roses, usually stolen from his mother’s garden, but once or twice he’d actually found the money to buy her a small bouquet. Every morning, as Bessie patted powder on her arms and legs, she closed her eyes and thought, just for a moment, about Matthew.
Dressed, she ate a quick breakfast and then took her customary morning walk along the beach just outside the back door of her cottage. She walked as far as the "new" cottages, smiling and nodding at a young family that was just emerging from one of the cottages as she walked past. Now that Easter was past, the cottages would just get busier and busier throughout the spring and summer season.<
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On her return trip, the oldest child of the family had begun a wobbly sandcastle and his little sister was sobbing as her mother tried to brush sand out of her mouth.
“She grabbed a handful before I could stop her,” the father was saying helplessly to his obviously angry wife.
“And you wonder why I don’t leave you in charge of them for any length of time,” the wife shouted back. “I was gone for two minutes, two bloody minutes.”
The toddler looked up from his castle building and met Bessie’s eyes. He almost seemed to shrug at Bessie as if to say his parents’ behaviour was nothing new. Bessie sighed to herself and headed home.
The sign next to her door read “Treoghe Bwaaue,” which was Manx for “Widow’s Cottage.” Some days Bessie wondered if she and Matthew would have done a better job of marriage and parenting than the examples she sometimes saw around her.
When she got inside, she took off her sandy trainers and then switched the ringer on her phone back on. She turned it off at night so that wrong numbers or salesmen didn’t disturb her. As she reached for the play button on her answering machine, the phone rang. Startled, she picked up the receiver without waiting to hear who it was.
“Hello?”
“Bessie? It’s Doona. Sit down. Are you sitting down? Moirrey’s dead.”
Chapter Three
Bessie gasped and then sank into the nearest chair. “Pardon?” she muttered.
“I said, Moirrey’s dead,” Doona repeated. “We just got the call here and Hugh and Inspector Rockwell headed out to her cottage to see what happened.”
“You don’t think she was murdered?” Bessie asked.
“Bessie, we’ve had two murders in Laxey since I’ve lived here, both last month and both of which you know more about than most people. I can’t imagine that this will turn out to be another one. Laxey is one the safest places in the world to live.”
Bessie nodded and then realised that Doona couldn’t see her. “Oh, er, sorry, of course. I guess, after last month, I’ve just got murder on my mind,” she said apologetically.
Aunt Bessie Believes (An Isle of Man Cozy Mystery) Page 4