Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  Jude stood up and, giving Lowell’s hand a quick squeeze, she left the room, going as fast as she could without alarming them. She took a mackintosh from the coat pegs at the back door and let herself out, sliding on the cobbles and then slopping and skidding over the soaked grass towards the bedraggled asparagus bed, where the white tent had been.

  “Knock knock,” she said, opening Mrs. Hewston’s kitchen door. The television through in the front room snapped off. “Only me,” she added, kicking off her clogs and folding her mackintosh over the back of one of the chairs to drip harmlessly on the lino.

  Mrs. Hewston was sitting in her upright armchair with her spectacles case clutched in one hand, the remote in the other. “You again!” she said. “I told that inspector everything I know. What do you want?”

  “I couldn’t work out why you kept the secret,” Jude said. “A baby born and stolen away and a body buried in your garden? Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “It was none of my business,” said Mrs. Hewston, sitting back a little, not even pretending she didn’t know about the body, not even bothering to tell her placenta story now.

  “No, that’s not it,” said Jude. “It was quid pro quo. Miranda wanted the baby. She kept her mouth shut about you, and you kept your mouth shut about her.”

  “About what about me?” said Mrs. Hewston, and Jude could see her chest rising and falling.

  “She came to you, didn’t she? She asked you for help and you refused to attend.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “You let Inez struggle away on her own and you let her die.”

  “She should have been in the hospital. I knew nothing about it.”

  “Of course she should have, but by the time Miranda knew she was in danger, she was too scared to call an ambulance. She thought the courts would take one look at Inez—trying to give birth on her own—and take the baby away. ”

  “And how could anyone blame them!” said Mrs. Hewston. “The girl wasn’t fit. None of them were good for anything, lying around the garden playing so-called music and taking those daft pictures with nothing in them.”

  “But you should have helped her.”

  “I didn’t know it was happening until it was too late,” said Mrs. Hewston. Her voice rang with outraged indignation. “First I knew, it was too late!”

  “But why did you keep quiet?” asked Jude. “If you weren’t at fault, what did you have to gain?”

  “It was none of my business,” said Mrs. Hewston again, and would say no more.

  The rest of the day went past a long way from Jude somehow. She was back in that clouded-glass paperweight again. She could see Liam and Terry taking turns holding Jade, see Raminder flirting with them, and Eddy’s wide eyes when she caught sight of one of Raminder’s enormous nipples. She could see Lowell at the head of the dinner table looking up and down both sides, beaming.

  It was winter and everyone except Eddy was older and sadder than anyone in 1994, but the house was full again, people were in love or falling in love, one baby was passed around, the other kicked and punched and everyone took a turn to feel it, standing with a hand on Eddy’s belly, heads cocked and eyes focussed on the distance, like safebreakers. Raminder talked about the ambulance service, telling funny stories. Eddy talked about Jolly’s Cottage and the attic rooms, where she should settle. Where the baby would be best when they came over to visit.

  “Shame about that bungalow,” Liam said.

  “No shifting Mrs. H.,” said Eddy. “She’ll live forever.”

  Through it all, Jude was silent. Once, in the hothouse at the botanic gardens at Kew she had brushed her hand across a cactus. A proper Desperate Dan cactus. She had brought away hundreds of fine hairs stuck in her skin, transferring to her clothes and back to her skin in new places, one near her eye, one on her lip. For days afterwards she had kept finding those tiny needle-hairs all over her.

  They were back now, the ghosts of them, piercing her in fifty different places. Where was the last hundred-books book? Why did Mrs. Hewston keep quiet? Who started the fire?

  “You were solemn tonight,” Lowell said once they were in their room. Liam and Terry were still up, but Raminder had lain down with Jade and fallen asleep, and Eddy, gravid now, had gone to bed at nine. “Was it the picture?”

  Jude shook her head. Lowell had decided to donate his collection to a museum of photography, with the condition that they would not be on open view but only available to scholars by consultation. The brown paper parcels were on the side table in the vestibule ready to go to the Post Office. Jude had only asked to look at one—the still girl and her blurred parents.

  “Are you sure?” she had asked Lowell. “She looks so perfect.”

  “That’s the problem,” Lowell had said. “That’s the clue. Life is so very far from perfect, my dearest. Life is filthy, ludicrous, perplexing chaos.”

  He emptied his pockets out onto the dressing table and yawned. “Is it hard seeing the little one?” he asked.

  “Jade? No. It’s not even hard seeing Raminder. Strangely.”

  “Hmph,” Lowell said. He was undressing, laying his clothes over the chair but putting his shirt and underpants in the basket, after Eddy’s nagging. He was bathing more too and shaving closely. Catching on quick, really. “I can’t say I care for her greatly. She’s rather abrasive.” Catching on very quick, Jude thought, smiling. Bitching up the new wife was basic boyfriend good manners. She wondered if he had read an article or if Eddy had coached him.

  “I’m just a bit done in with it all,” she said. Lowell nodded and got calmly into bed beside her in his striped pyjamas, lifting his book and settling his spectacles.

  “You should read,” he said. “A quiet book is better than a tranquiliser. Young Eddy has been asking for a television in her bedroom, but that’s a dreadful idea. I shall select some bedside reading for her instead. Or you can.” He nodded at the little pile on her table. O. Douglas, Rebecca, the Allingham, Midnight’s Children, and the downed plane with the rugged chap and his love interest. Jude turned to them. It felt like a year since she laid them beside her bed upstairs in the pink room. They had followed her to Jolly’s Cottage, back here to the room across the landing, and finally to Lowell’s bed, and she’d never so much as glanced at any of them.

  She pulled the whole pile onto her lap. Allingham’s Beckoning Lady started with a corpse. No good for her tonight. Rebecca too, with its lost woman and all its secrets, was far from what she wanted. And O. Douglas was too much the other way. Too sweet and light, too far to bridge from her life to that world. That left the ripping yarn —but it made anguish and disaster seem like such a jape—and so it came down to Midnight’s Children. She opened it to read the jacket copy and her breath died in her throat. There it was in the fly-leaf. T. Jolly. She flipped to the back.

  “Gosh, never had you down as one of those,” murmured Lowell beside her.

  Etta is gone, Todd had written. M. says heart this time. Her heart was stronger than mine. I’m not going to say anything. I want to end my days here in my own house with my quiet neighbours. But when I’m gone someone should know what happened here and so I’ll write it down. She thinks getting rid of us will bring her what she wants, but she’s wrong. He doesn’t love her.

  “Lowell,” Jude said. “You know when Begbie went to interview Mrs. Hewston?”

  “Mm?” said Lowell, deep in his book.

  “I went out to the kitchen to fetch you a glass of water and I missed the bit when they asked for her full name. They always do that, though, don’t they? Ask for your full name.”

  “Mm.”

  “What’s her name? No one calls her it because … Well, I don’t know why not, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it.”

  “Ahhhhh—what?” said Lowell, putting his book down open on his lap and blinking at her.

  “What’s Mrs. Hewst
on’s first name? She must have said it to the policeman.”

  “Ahhh, Marion, I think,” said Lowell. Jude said nothing. “Can I go back to reading?”

  “Your father didn’t kill anyone,” Jude said.

  “I appreciate your kindness,” said Lowell, “but there’s no need.”

  “I’m serious.” She put the stack of books on the table and turned to face him, kneeling up half in and half out of the covers. “She killed your father’s old patients because she wanted him to retire and run away with her. When he threatened to have them exhumed, she told him. That’s why he left and why he never came back and why he was haunted for the rest of his life.”

  “But why would Mrs. Hewston think my father cared for her in that way?” said Lowell. “He never gave her any indication of it, I’m sure.”

  “Me too,” said Jude. “But her faith has never wavered.”

  The Plexiglas bubble was gone and the hair-like needles were driven out of her completely. Jude felt as if she was floating high above the earth looking down on them all and could see everything. “She ran a book club. For the community, she said. Really, it was so she could get into everyone’s houses. She killed them, Lowell.”

  Lowell shuddered and put his hand on Jude’s knee. “Did she set the fire?” he said.

  “Of course she did. I heard her on the street in the fog and she hurried away. She left the note, she set the fire, and then she nearly blew it. The next morning when we came back here with the firemen she was halfway across the lawn to come and cluck about it when she realised she hadn’t been to the shop yet and she shouldn’t know! She’s not as sharp as she was.”

  “Did Jackie phone her?” Lowell said.

  “I suppose so,” said Jude. “We can ask.”

  “And did Jackie guess in ’85 and then keep quiet?”

  “We can ask that too.”

  They were silent for a moment and then, “Oh!” Lowell covered his mouth with his hand. “Did she kill Inez?”

  “No,” Jude said. “No, I believe what she said to me today. It was too late by the time she knew anything. But I could never work out why she would keep the secret. Why she would let Miranda go with the baby and keep quiet. I know now. She didn’t want any trouble. She had got away with murder five times and she didn’t want police and press sniffing round. This was only ten years later, remember. It’s thirty years now and she’s been hiding in her house since the news broke. Don’t tell me that didn’t surprise you.”

  Lowell spent a moment or two thinking hard, his eyes moving back and forward, gathering facts, checking memories, matching questions and answers. Then he clapped his hands, almost crying with relief, whooping with it.

  “Shut up!” came Eddy’s muffled voice through the wall. “You’re disgusting.”

  Lowell only laughed louder. He jumped out of bed.

  “Where are you going?” Jude asked him.

  “To phone the police!” he said. “To get this straightened out at last after all these years! To clear my family name.” He stopped to kiss Jude once on the head, a rounded smack that was still ringing in her ears when he’d gone.

  She had made him so happy. She hadn’t even realised he felt guilty, that he cared about his family name. She lay back and stared up at the ceiling. Of course it was better that the truth was out. And it was good for Lowell to be able to remember his father again without—what did he call it, a stain? But she was sorry. She had felt they were a better match when he was the son of a killer.

  She had even imagined that one day she’d be able to tell him and he’d be able to forgive her. Now, seeing how happy he was to have the weight lifted, she wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was hers to take to the grave. Hers and Raminder’s, anyway.

  If Max had only fallen off the wagon for the first time, Raminder wouldn’t know. But since it was the fourth time, she’d be quite familiar with him dropping onto the bed on his face and letting his head hang down, airways clear. She can’t have thought of it when she saw him lying there for the last time, but she’d certainly thought of it since. No regrets, no complaints, she’d said. And Tom and Bernie? Of course they checked the house. Of course they saw their old pal Max lying there drunk, with his wife at the bottom of the stairs. And they left him … like that.

  So it wasn’t Jude’s fault alone. But it was her hand. She had reached out and turned him over onto his back to look at his face. And then she had walked away, out of the room, out of the house, out of the country. She had left behind everything she’d ever felt for him. All the love and hate. She had left behind her clean job and her safe flat and her sensible life, and now she had Lowell and Eddy and the baby and Liam and Terry and Maureen and Jackie and Bill, and she would see Inez laid to rest and Mrs. Hewston brought to justice, and she would replant the muddy wreck of the asparagus bed and learn how tend to roses. She would get the stock online and look over the accounts and put LG Books to rights. She would live a life. Not filthy, not ludicrous, not chaos. But probably perplexing. Probably permanently perplexing.

  She could hear Lowell coming back up the stairs, still talking. He must have made the call with Eddy’s mobile. She would keep it to herself, and let this good man be happy. She would accept what the world had just laid at her feet and she would let the memory go. She reached out and picked up the O. Douglas, thinking perhaps it wasn’t too sweet after all. It would do quite nicely. For tonight, anyway.

  the end

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank: Donna Andrews, Frankie Bailey, Terri Bischoff, Kevin Brown, Leslie Budewitz, Jessie Chandler, Mathew Clemens, Laura DiSilverio, Cari Dubiel, Barb Fister, Audrey Ford, Beth Hanson, Julie Henrikus, Wendy Keegan, Louise Kelly, Catherine Lepreux, Jessie Lourey, Jim and Jean McPherson, Neil McRoberts, Gin Malliet, Karen Maslowski, Katie Mickshl, Erin Mitchell, Lisa Moylett, Nicole Nugent, Lori Rader Day, Martha Reed, Eileen Rendahl, Sarah Rizzo, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Sarah Shaber, Susan Shea, Spring Warren, Beth Wasson, Molly Weston, Dina Wilner, and Simon Wood, who have all helped me get through this year, fraying at the edges but never quite unravelling completely.

  Extra special thanks to Judy Bobalik, Clare O’Donohue, Risa Rispoli, and Terri Bischoff (with a very different hat on). They know why.

  Facts and Fictions

  Wigtown is a real place in Scotland and the streets in this book are real streets. There is a cemetery and a harbour and a bowling green. There is even a big house where Jamaica House is imagined to be. And there are lots of bookshops and a wonderful literature festival every autumn (www.wigtownbookfestival.com). But none of the specific businesses or other houses in Quiet Neighbors are based in reality and none of the characters are related in any way to real individuals, living or dead. Todd Jolly’s cottage isn’t there, in case anyone goes looking.