Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  “What time was this?” she said.

  “Once you’d gone,” said Lowell. “About half an hour after you went home. Why?”

  Because, thought Jude, if she had gone home without getting lost, she would have been safely inside by then and, if Eddy had climbed out the bathroom window and come to leave a note, Jude would have found it this morning.

  But why would Eddy care about Todd and the rest—Etta and Archie and them. The them she now knew was Norma Oughton and Elspeth Day. How would she even know their names to write on the note?

  “No reason,” she said. “And as to what she was up to, do you really want to know? She could have been waxing her legs, waxing anything really. Pore strips?”

  “What are—?” said Lowell. Then he held up a hand. “Don’t tell me. Well well, yes, I see. Dear me. I should probably apologise to her then for scolding her.”

  “Or just leave it,” Jude said. “Least said soonest mended?”

  “Indeed,” Lowell said. “Let peace descend.”

  Jude smiled, offered to make coffee, and was half turned away before his words hit her.

  “Let there be light,” she said, turning back.

  Lowell pushed his glasses up his head and looked at her from under a wrinkled brow. “One would never argue with that sentiment, my dear,” he said, “but I’m not sure I quite understand the force of it here and now.”

  “What is that?” said Jude. “It’s not a … I mean, you’re not saying, Oh go on, let there be light, will you, just this once?”

  “Hah!” said Lowell. “No indeed. No indeed. God save the queen isn’t God? Save the queen, won’t you, old chap? No, it’s not a command—how very perspicacious of you. It’s a relic of an earlier time when English was rather better off for grammar than it is these days. It’s a subjunctive, my dear.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Expressing wishes or desires or hopes or—”

  “Oh, right!” said Jude. “Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it? It’s like, I hope God saves the queen. I hope there’s some light. Got it.” But it wasn’t firmly embedded. She had to go quickly to the kettle corner, fill it under the tap, and stay out of Lowell’s way while it boiled, thinking it through.

  The note. Let the dead rest, she decided, might not be an order at all. It might be a hope. It might have been someone telling her to keep digging, so that those who were resting ill could eventually rest easy. In fact, that made a lot more sense. Why would anyone warn her off and at the same time tell her the names she was trying to find out?

  She poured water into the mugs, turning sharply away as the sour hit of the coffee granules reached her nose. She would have to do something about this kettle and jar of Nescafé if she really was going to stay here. On the heels of that thought, all the reality she had pushed back came flooding in again and she was struck still, standing there like a stone in the dark corridor.

  What was she doing? What was she thinking? The last thing she should do was attract the attention of someone who might want her to leave this perfect hiding place. If the note was a warning, she should heed it. If the note was an invitation to poke around in a dormant nest of adders, she should ignore it. The only reason she should be looking at gravestones at all was to find that elusive young woman, born around the same time as her and dying before she had worked or signed on for benefits or got a driver’s licence or done anything that would get in the way of Jude becoming her, staying in Wigtown, and starting over.

  She would fill the bookshelves of her cottage with all Todd’s volumes, just for fun, just because he had eclectic tastes and a way with words. It didn’t have to be connected to anything, or mean anything, or put her in any danger. She told herself that as she went into the dead room for the morning. Lowell was on the desk and she was determined to make a proper dent in the mountain today.

  She had a false alarm with a bag full of hardbacks from the early eighties. They looked like books you’d want to read before you die —David Copperfield, The Great Gatsby, The Count of Monte Cristo—but they had the stickers she had come to loathe, like barnacles after all these years. And also in the bag were knitting patterns for babies’ bootees and bonnets and People’s Friend annuals for ten years stopping in 1983. Not T. Jolly’s taste at all.

  They were kitsch enough to find a market in a city, she thought, flipping through them. They would make great toilet books in a boutique hotel run by people who thought they’d invented irony. Maureen would be able to sell the knitting patterns, certainly. She dished the bag’s contents out between her three towers and carried on, telling herself she was letting them rest, knowing she wasn’t, really.

  Twenty

  By lunchtime, she had turned the canyon into a wide valley, emptying and dispersing seventeen bags, emptying and flattening twenty boxes. Down and down she went from Deathly Hallows to the Philosopher’s Stone. She hoped poor J.K. didn’t poke around secondhand bookshops these days, because they would hurt her heart and it wasn’t a true reflection. Harry was loved more than anyone else in the land, except maybe Jesus and Kate.

  One of the boxes had a very old mouse nest in it, all the books in one corner nibbled to a kind of dry froth and the whole thing reeking of urine and rattling with desiccated pellets when she moved it.

  “Stand back,” she said, emerging with it at arm’s length. “Eddy, get the door!”

  Eddy, who had been sitting almost horizontally in Lowell’s chair with her legs stuck straight out and her chin on her chest, leapt up and sprinted along the hall.

  “Garden door, Eddy,” Jude said. “Gawd, what a stink when it shifts.”

  “What is it?” said Eddy, trotting back again. She scooted ahead of Jude to the back of Coasters and Key Rings, reached up, took the garden-door key down from above the doorframe, and opened it.

  “It’s what landlords call ‘evidence of rodent activity’,” Jude said. “Ugh.” She put the box down on the small patch of concrete right outside and turned away, wiping her hands. “I’ll take it down to the wheeliebin after lunch. If I do it now I’ll lose my appetite.” Then she gave Eddy a smile. She couldn’t help it. “Good thing you knew where the key was. I don’t remember telling you.”

  Eddy looked blankly at her, not scowling but without even a wisp of a smile. “Dad told me,” she said.

  “Funny,” said Jude. “I kept meaning to tell him where I put it, but I forgot.”

  “Lucky guess,” said Eddy. “Why are you being such a bitch?”

  “Speak your mind, why don’t you,” said Jude. “Because you won’t tell me why you were in the garden that first day.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “I covered for you with Lowell about last night.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I told him you were waxing your legs or something.”

  “So? What do you mean ‘covered for me’? I was … doing my hair. And texting.”

  She looked scornful and completely calm and actually now that Jude took a closer look at her hair it did look lovely, shining like a beetle’s back.

  “So you didn’t jump out the window and go wandering?”

  “Jump?” said Eddy, pointing at her belly with both hands, like a rapper. “No I didn’t ‘jump’. Why the hell would I? Lowell would drive me anywhere I wanted to go. What are you on about?”

  Jude took a long time to decide, but in the end she locked the back door again, saying to Eddy, “I’ve got to trust someone and God help me, it looks like it’s you.” She shouted upstairs, “We’re going out for lunch!”

  They both heard Lowell’s muffled reply from somewhere on the second floor and heard the old house creak as he began to move.

  “Laters!” Eddy shouted, and they hurried towards the front door. “That sounds tons better in your accent than mine. No one Northern Irish is cool. God, it’s brilliant to see the sun!” she went
on as they emerged. “Where we going?”

  Jude smiled at the girl’s instant lift in spirits, then she put her face up and let the dishwater sunshine lighten her own eyelids. “Liam Neeson’s cool,” she said. “Picnic down by the harbour?”

  “He’s bloody ancient,” said Eddy. “He’s Lowell’s age. You shouldn’t give up so easy, Jude. If you did a bit of work and got some different clothes, you could totally get someone great.”

  Jude only laughed. Then, hurrying to catch up with Eddy—who was sailing along no matter what she’d said about jumping—she put a hand on her arm. “Cool it when we go past the Post Office, all right? Jackie’s really ill in hospital and we don’t want to look unfeeling.”

  “Who to?” said Eddy. “It’s shut. And how do you know anyway? How do you know so much about everyone? You’re like a spy or something. God, I wish there was a chipper. Do you think the café round the top road’ll do chips to carry out?”

  They didn’t, but they did sandwiches and chocolate and cans of Sprite, and the sun, at the height of its short arc, had a trace of mild warmth about it that the breeze couldn’t quite blow away. So, as they larked down the harbour road towards the picnic tables, Jude felt a lightness she almost didn’t recognise. Not since Max dropped his trio of bombshells—girlfriend, pregnant, over—had she looked forward to telling another person her worries and having them soothed away.

  That was part of the problem, she’d realised, once it was too late. All her friends were their friends, mostly from the ambulance depot, and so they went with Max when the time came to choose. Her own friends? She had let them go, the girls’ nights turning to lunches and then to emails and then to Christmas cards as she made her nest and shared it with Max. You’re my best friend, she used to say. And he smiled and ruffled her hair. It only occurred to her during the divorce that he had never replied.

  “Bloody seagulls!” Eddy said, looking at the splotched picnic benches when they arrived. It wasn’t what Jude had imagined. A harbour to her meant Southend or Margate: bustle and boat-trips, vendors of tourist tat. Here there was a wooden jetty, a tarmac car park edged with more of the high bracken, and these picnic benches. “Rip that bag and we’ll sit on half each,” Eddy said.

  They settled themselves side by side, both facing the water. The tide that rolled quietly in and out of the bay was at its gentle highest, and the water lapped and slopped against the wooden bracings while the few small boats not yet taken out for winter tugged at their moorings and seesawed on the dips and swells.

  “I’ll puke if I watch that anymore,” Eddy said after a few bites. She rose and resettled herself, facing in towards the fields, staring across the table at Jude. “Right then,” she said. “Shoot.”

  “Something’s going on,” Jude said.

  “No shit,” said Eddy, “but we agreed we wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “I don’t mean with you or me,” Jude said. “Something else.”

  She put her sandwich down on its wrapper. It was making her feel heavy in her heart, the way a lot of things about Wigtown seemed to. It was a place from the past. Instant coffee in polystyrene cups and these tuna sandwiches, made from sliced bread scraped with margarine. And for every middle-aged woman in a velour tracksuit with a water bottle, there was another one with a tartan shopping trolley and a plastic rain bonnet. The men at the bowling club wore shirts and ties, and the children at the primary school played hopscotch. What with finding another Valley of the Dolls or Little Red Hen every day, altogether too much about the place took her back to when she was a child and seemed to make that lost time so close that, perhaps if she tried hard, she could jump tracks and end up somewhere that wasn’t here and now. She could keep up with her girlfriends, stick with the exposure therapy, or make it so she never needed the bloody exposure therapy. She could ignore Max that night in that bar when he kept looking over and smiling. And she could tell her parents what no competent adult should ever need to be told: don’t sleep in a closed garage with your engine running. If she had done all of that, she would be single and surrounded with pals, or happily married to someone else, taking him round to tea at her mum’s every Sunday. She wouldn’t be sitting on a plastic bag on a picnic bench covered in seagull shit, about to be mocked by a teenage headcase like Eddy. But then she flashed on Lowell’s face and his voice saying It’s a subjunctive, my dear, and she couldn’t help smiling.

  “I had an anonymous note shoved through my letterbox last night,” she said. “I wondered if maybe you had put it there.”

  “Nope,” said Eddy. “I’ll tell you stuff to your face: you should grow your hair and get some highlights in it, and you wear your jumpers too long.” She winked, but something in Jude’s expression got to her and, after clearing her throat, she started listening.

  “It said Let the dead rest.”

  “But that’s just kids. That’s just someone yanking your chain, isn’t it? Cos you live in a graveyard.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jude said. “Because then it gave names. Five names of dead people. And three of them were names that had come up before. Written in books at the shop.”

  “What do you mean written in books? You mean like voodoo?”

  “What?” said Jude. “I’m serious. Someone—Todd Jolly, who lived in my cottage—was recording the names of people who died. There were four and then he was the last one.”

  “Of course he was last!” Eddy said. “It’s like that hundred books, isn’t it? He’s hardly going to write more names after he’s dead.”

  “But here’s the clincher. Whoever wrote the note last night went round the graves too. They left footprints in the frosty grass.”

  Eddy had grown slack-jawed as she listened. Jude could see a half-chewed bite of sandwich in her cheek. She washed it down with a painful-looking gulp of Sprite and then answered.

  “Of course they went round the graves,” she said. “They had to, to get names to write down to yank your chain. And of course they left footprints. It’s when someone’s flitting about a graveyard without leaving footprints that you have to worry.”

  “That’s—” Jude began and then blinked. “Shit, that’s true.”

  “It’s quite funny, really,” said Eddy. “Like some kind of neighbourhood watch committee! I don’t blame you for thinking it was me. I might have done it if I’d thought of it.”

  “Okay,” Jude said. “Okay. I admit, I’ve made fool of myself.”

  “You’re under a lot of stress,” Eddy said.

  “But when I mentioned it to Jackie, she pretty much warned me off. And then she collapsed. The same day.”

  “Mentioned what? If you only found out late last night when you went home from Jamaica House, how’d she even know?”

  “I mentioned two of the names—Etta Bell and Archie Patterstone—when I stopped in at the shop at teatime. And she definitely knows something.” Jude sat ruminating for a moment about how best to explain it to Eddy. It was real; she knew it was. But it was a delicate thread and Eddy could break it with one shout of her scoffing laughter. Jude pulled the frilly edge of a lettuce leaf and it slid out of her sandwich, slick with dressing, wilted dark where the oil had got in. She let it drop and wiped her fingers.

  “Etta and Archie and them are resting easy,” she said, and arched her eyebrows. “That’s what Jackie said to me.”

  “Resting easy?” Eddy echoed and Jude saw that her interest was hooked. She wasn’t a stupid kid, not by any means. “And then the note said let the dead rest too?”

  Jude nodded. “But she really didn’t have time. She shut the shop at six and she was at home away down that way somewhere at half past and collapsed as soon as she got in the door.”

  Eddy looked over at where Jude was pointing and then back towards the town. “Half an hour?” she said. “Yeah, that’s pretty tight. That would totally make you collapse if you’d legged it there and back,
eh?” She had finished her sandwich and now she screwed up the paper, looked around, and threw it at the bin, missing. “Come on! Get that sarnie down you and let’s time it.”

  “It was foggy.”

  “Yeah, but she was born here. I bet anyone who belonged here could trot about just fine in a fog or that.”

  Jude remembered the footsteps hurrying away from her last night. “Okay, but actually, Eddy, before we go chasing off? That’s not the bit I was thinking of. Etta and Archie and them are resting easy. Resting is only part of the puzzle, you see?”

  Eddy finished her Sprite and burped, getting through doh, ray, mee before it ran out. “Pardon,” she said. And then went on in a singsong voice, counting the words off on her fingers. “Resting. Easy. Etta. Archie.” She stopped, crooked her head to one side and gave Jude a look. “Wait a minute,” she said. “And who? Etta and Archie and who?”

  “Right,” said Jude. “Exactly. Now, I know this was a long time ago and I know they’d all be dead now anyway. But there’s two things I know for sure. Auntie Lorna—Jackie’s Auntie Lorna—was ninety-nine and she went into a nursing home.”

  “The one Lowell’s dad made him work in?”

  “I don’t know. But she went into the nursing home and died pretty much overnight. And Todd Jolly died at home. He left his cottage to Dr. Glen in gratitude for all the care and help and things that meant he never had to go into the nursing home. And he kept notes about who died. He wrote in his books. They started like reviews, but then they … changed into something else.”

  Eddy was sparking now. Her eyes darted from side to side and she played a little tune with her tongue and her bottom lip. “Bloody hell,” she said. “I knew there was something weird about this place. So you think everybody put their oldsters in this home to make sure they didn’t rip through the inheritance? I wonder if it’s still open.” She cast her eyes at Jude’s half-eaten sandwich and wilted lettuce leaf lying on top of it. “Are you eating that or can we get going?”