“As a member of the team, Phillip has a vested interest in preventing tragedies,” Christopher informed me.
“Vested interest or no, he saved my bacon,” I said. “I’ve been on the receiving end of an awful lot of kindness since I stumbled into St. Alfege’s. I’m glad you came up with a way for me to give back.” I grinned slyly as I drew a pair of waterproof hiking gloves from my shoulder bag and put them on. “I’m ready to go when you are.”
“You certainly are,” he said, smiling. “Village hall, here we come.”
“Mum’s the word if we see Jean or Gavin,” I warned as we readied ourselves to venture outdoors. “They’re short on sleep and scrambling to cover a lot of bases. I’ll tell them about Jemima’s ghost when the right moment presents itself.”
Christopher pretended to zip his lips, but they didn’t stay zipped for long. The moment we left the inn, he glanced up and exclaimed with great pleasure, “The sign! They’ve rehung the sign!”
The sign that had been removed the previous day for safety’s sake now hung by chains from the iron bar implanted in the oak beam above the inn’s recessed front door. The sign was an oblong wooden board upon which the inn’s name had been painted in curlicued gold letters above a carved and painted bas-relief of an old wooden barrel filled to spilling with bright gold coins.
“Charming, isn’t it?” said Christopher as raindrops streamed down his upturned face. “I’ve never seen another one like it.”
“It’s delightful,” I agreed. “Well worth the wait.”
I felt a little giddy. A sugary breakfast, a slight improvement in the weather, and the knowledge that I’d escaped a watery grave filled me with a sense of energetic well-being. Though the rain fell steadily, it no longer fell hard enough to bruise my skull, and the air, however damp, was fresher and cleaner than the air I’d breathed in the attic. When Christopher urged me to admire the inn’s frontage all over again, I was happy to oblige.
“The effect is incomplete without the sign,” he asserted, patting his face dry with a neatly folded white handkerchief.
“Like spaghetti without meatballs,” I said, “or the Mona Lisa without a smile.”
“You’re teasing me,” he said ruefully.
“Maybe a little,” I admitted as we walked on, “but I do like the sign. The gold coins in the barrel must be the king’s ransom.”
“Indeed,” he said, “but I regret to say that I have been unable to identify the king.”
“Charles the Second?” I guessed. “He rambled around the south of England while he was dodging Cromwell’s army, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Christopher, “but he didn’t ramble as far east as Shepney, and he was never held to ransom. I asked the Hancocks who the king was, but they didn’t know.”
“We need a local historian,” I said.
“Perhaps we’ll meet one in the village hall,” said Christopher.
“If we don’t, we’ll conduct a house-to-house search for one,” I joked. “I can’t leave Shepney without solving the inn’s most impenetrable mystery!”
“I’d prefer to solve the inn’s other mystery,” Christopher said quietly.
“What other mystery?” I asked.
A determined gleam lit his blue eyes as he turned his collar up and shoved his gloved hands into his pockets. “I want to know why Jemima believes in ghosts.”
Ten
Shepney seemed to lead a charmed existence. I couldn’t vouch for the entire village or for the farmland that surrounded Shepney’s hill, but the high street appeared to be miraculously unscathed. Every window we passed was intact, and the flapping tarpaulins I associated with roof damage were notable for their absence. If it hadn’t been for some truly impressive puddles, I wouldn’t have known that a cyclone had blown through the village.
Though the rain continued unabated, the cyclone’s windy phase was clearly over. Many hanging signs had been rehung, and sandwich boards scrawled with menus or with vivid sale notices stood once again outside their places of business. The café tables and chairs had not yet reappeared, but the flowerpots had. Mums, nasturtiums, asters, and Michaelmas daisies raised cheerful faces to the lowering sky. I hoped they had good drainage.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the state of emergency, a holiday atmosphere pervaded Shepney’s high street. Every parking spot was taken, presumably by evacuees, and the shops were as crowded as the inn’s foyer. In true English fashion, people clustered on the sidewalks beneath small forests of umbrellas to pass the time of day with friends and neighbors.
A pair of traffic monitors in high-visibility gear patrolled the high street, but there was virtually no traffic for them to patrol. Road closures remained in effect, ensuring that the only vehicles to leave or to enter the village were emergency vehicles. A ripple of cheers and energetic applause greeted a forest-green Range Rover as it cruised down the street, towing a rubber dinghy on a trailer. I wondered if the dinghy had played a role in rescuing the family of four from its half-drowned car.
I saw no one else in high-visibility gear until we entered the village hall, where loose-fitting lime-green vests distinguished the helpers from the helped. The helpers buzzing around the lobby reminded me of the sturdy middle-aged women who ran Finch’s multitudinous village events. They dashed past us, intent upon their duties, while we followed a series of hand-lettered signs that led us to the INFORMATION / VOLUNTEER SIGN-UP table in the corridor that divided the building in two.
A sturdy middle-aged woman with tightly curled gray hair sat behind the table, dispensing answers to questions put to her with varying degrees of urgency. Though “Where’s the toilet?” seemed to be the most common query, I overheard several others while Christopher and I waited to volunteer.
“Is the bell tower open, Rebecca?” a grizzled old man asked the woman. “I can see my farm from there. I want to know if it’s underwater.”
“You know very well that your farm’s underwater, Jack,” Rebecca replied tartly. “The only question is: How deep? I should be able to answer it after the spotters come in from their rounds.”
“What about the bell tower?” he demanded stubbornly.
“You can put the bell tower right out of your mind, Jack Stanton,” Rebecca said sternly. “Your wife would have my head if I encouraged you to climb those stairs. You’d give yourself a stroke, and the medical team has better things to do than to look after a foolish old man who made himself ill. Connie Fordyce’s baby is due any minute. Do you expect her to deliver it by herself? Come back at noon and I’ll give you the spotters’ report.”
The old man was replaced instantly by a flustered mother accompanied by three bickering children. Rebecca gave her directions to the schoolhouse and explained patiently that the children did not have to be registered at the school in order to attend classes.
“When you’ve dropped them off, come back for a cup of tea, dear,” Rebecca advised her. “You look as though you could use one.”
The mother agreed wholeheartedly and herded her brawling brood toward the front door.
“Bishop Wyndham!” Rebecca exclaimed, beckoning us to come forward. “I heard you were in town. Sorry about the cyclone.”
“I don’t hold you personally responsible for it, Mrs. Hanson,” said Christopher, shaking her hand. “I intended to leave Shepney this morning, but Mother Nature altered my plans.”
“Mother Nature has changed everyone’s plans.” Rebecca tilted her head toward the flustered mother. “That poor woman was on her way to Hastings with her family when the storm hit. They’ve been stuck here since yesterday morning. Her husband keeps volunteering to wash dishes. If you ask me, he does it just to get away from the kiddies. You’re lodging at The King’s Ransom, aren’t you?”
“I am,” he replied.
“Sick of the rector fawning over you?” Rebecca said shrewdly.
“Th
e rectory is full up,” the bishop said with exquisite diplomacy. “May I introduce my friend Lori Shepherd? She was on her way to Rye when the storm interrupted her journey.”
“Where are you lodging, Lori?” Rebecca asked, suddenly alert.
“At the inn,” I replied. “The Hancocks found a bed for me in the attic.”
Rebecca consulted a clipboard. “Here you are—here you both are. Bishop Wyndham and Lori Shepherd at The King’s Ransom.” She looked up. “We try to keep track of everyone in Shepney during an emergency.”
“Good idea,” I said, oddly reassured by the knowledge that my name was on her list.
“If it’s not too much trouble, Mrs. Hanson,” said Christopher, “I would very much like to know what spotters are.”
“We send teams out to keep an eye on the floodwaters,” said Rebecca. “They report back every hour on the hour. It’s the kind of job locals do best. They know who lives where, so they can give each landowner an accurate report on the state of his or her property.”
“A cogent explanation,” said Christopher. “Thank you. Lori and I would be useless as spotters, of course, but we’re keen to help in some other way.”
“I’ve got just the job for you, Bishop,” said Rebecca. She flagged down another middle-aged woman in a lime-green vest. “Susan? Here’s Bishop Wyndham, come to volunteer. Take him to the back room, will you?”
“And Lori?” Christopher inquired.
Rebecca favored me with an appraising look. She must have decided that I was as sturdy as she was because she said, “You can work a shift clearing tables, dear. Susan’ll take you to the dining hall, and Kenneth Cartwright will show you the ropes.”
Christopher and I added our signatures to Rebecca’s volunteer list, then accompanied Susan to a cloakroom, where we left our wet coats; to a locker room, where I left my wet shoulder bag; and to the dining hall, where the bishop and I parted ways. Susan was too busy fawning over her esteemed guest to introduce me to Kenneth Cartwright, so I entered the dining hall alone, hoping to find someone who would point him out to me.
The proscenium stage at one end of the dining hall indicated that the room wasn’t normally occupied by people consuming hearty meals at rectangular folding tables. The air was redolent with the mouthwatering scents of fried bacon and sizzling sausages, as well as the din of families, friends, and stranded strangers making the best of a bad situation.
I scanned the room until I spotted a gangly teenaged boy clearing a table that looked as if it had recently been vacated by a hoard of barbarians—or a trio of bickering children. The boy had a mussed thatch of light brown hair, dark brown eyes, and a long, delicate nose that suited his long, thin face. He wore a bibbed cotton apron over a khaki shirt and blue jeans, and he appeared to be lost in thought, as though he were pondering ponderous matters while he loaded a plastic tub with dirty dishes. When I realized that he was the only person at work in the dining hall, I crossed to speak with him.
“Kenneth Cartwright?” I said tentatively.
“You serve yourself,” he said, raising his left hand to indicate a table set up as a breakfast buffet. Since his shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows, I couldn’t help but notice the misshapen human skull tattooed on his forearm. The stark image seemed at odds with his subdued demeanor, but I refrained from commenting on it. Teenagers, I knew, could be sensitive about such things.
“I’ve already eaten breakfast,” I explained. “My name is Lori and I’m here to help. Rebecca Hanson said you’d show me the ropes.”
Kenneth stopped loading his tub and gazed shyly at me.
“I’ll get you an apron,” he said.
* * *
—
After donning a bibbed apron plucked from a pile in the kitchen, I pushed up my sleeves and got to work. I filled plastic tubs with dishes, carted them to the steamy kitchen, and, by dint of throwing questions at Kenneth, discovered that he was fourteen years old, that he was a student at Winchester College, and that he’d been given leave to return home from his boarding school for his mother’s birthday, a leave the cyclone had extended indefinitely. I chatted with my bashful coworker for nearly an hour before I asked him about his tattoo. Bill would have been amazed by my restraint.
“What’s with the skull?” I said as we cleared opposite sides of the same table. “Are you in a gang?”
“No,” he replied, blushing crimson. “It’s not a real tattoo. Mum would have killed me if I’d gotten a real tattoo, so I did it myself with henna.”
“It’s striking,” I said admiringly. “Why a skull?”
“I . . . I want to be a paleontologist.” He spoke defiantly, as if he expected me to laugh at him. When I didn’t, he extended his arm across the table to allow me to see his faux tattoo more clearly. “It’s a forensic artist’s reconstruction of Lucy’s skull.”
Hoping fervently that he hadn’t needed a forensic artist to reconstruct a dead girlfriend’s skull, I searched my memory for a Lucy related to the study of fossils. It took me less than two seconds to come up with one of the many scraps of knowledge my magpie mind had accumulated over the years.
“Lucy, the hominid?” I hazarded.
“Australopithecus afarensis,” he said, nodding eagerly.
“The fossilized human skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson in Ethiopia,” I said as one scrap led to another, “and named Lucy after the Beatles’ song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’”
“How do you know about Dr. Johanson?” Kenneth asked, sounding flabbergasted.
“We were both born and raised in Chicago,” I replied. “I’ve never met Dr. Johanson, but as a fellow Chicagoan, I take pride in his accomplishments.”
My scraps of knowledge served me well. From that moment on, Kenneth treated me like a trusted friend. He spoke with unbridled enthusiasm about his lifelong fascination with paleontology and confessed that it hadn’t won him much respect in Shepney.
“People here thought I was a weirdo,” he told me, “because I used to look for bones when I was little.”
“Not in the churchyard, I hope,” I said, adding a smile to show my sensitive young friend that I was jesting.
“The churchyard was the only place I didn’t look,” he said. “I used to climb all over the hill, hunting for animal bones—foxes, rabbits, birds, sometimes a sheep. I wanted to train my eye to recognize bones in a natural setting, the way Dr. Johanson saw Lucy’s bones in Ethiopia.” He blushed again and ducked his head. “I’ll never make a discovery as momentous as his, but I’d like to try.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” I said. “I’m sure Dr. Johanson was as awed by his predecessors as you are by him. With a lot of hard work and a little luck, you could find yourself on the top rung of the paleontological ladder. Before you launch your career, though, I’d like you to promise me one thing.”
“What?” he asked, coming to a standstill.
“Promise me that you won’t get a real tattoo,” I said.
“You sound like my mum,” he said with a hint of age-appropriate sulkiness in his voice. “Why shouldn’t I get a real tattoo?”
“Because,” I replied, “a professional paleontologist doesn’t need one.”
He nodded thoughtfully, as if I’d said something profound. His mother, I told myself, would thank me one day.
“Also,” I continued in a lighter tone, “you don’t want to end up looking like Steve.”
It wasn’t the longest shot I’d ever taken. I reckoned that someone like Steve would stand out in a village like Shepney.
“You’ve met Steve, have you?” Kenneth said guardedly, resuming his work.
“I have,” I said. “I peeled parsnips for him last night at The King’s Ransom.”
“Only an idiot would want to end up like him,” Kenneth muttered.
I eyed my dish-filled tub and said, “I wouldn’t
mind having his muscles right now.”
“Do you know how he got them?” Kenneth asked.
“Lifting weights?” I said.
“He lifted weights, all right,” said Kenneth. “There wasn’t much else for him to do while he was in prison.”
The sight of Monsieur Renault tucking a white packet inside his blue blazer returned to me unbidden. I hadn’t thought of the white packet since the fat little Frenchman had scurried past me after his contretemps with Steve, but Kenneth’s words brought it vividly to mind. What was in the packet, I wondered, and why had Monsieur Renault brought it to the kitchen? Was he peddling wares from a past Steve was trying to escape?
I lowered my gaze to conceal my thoughts while saying casually, “I didn’t know Steve had been in prison.”
“That’s where he learned to cook,” Kenneth informed me.
“He must have graduated with honors,” I said. “He’s a phenomenal chef. Why was he put away?”
“Sorry, Lori, but I’m not supposed to talk about it,” Kenneth replied reluctantly. “If I do, it’ll get back to my mum—everything does—and she’ll kill me.”
“Did she tell you why Steve is off limits?” I asked.
He heaved a long-suffering sigh, as if abiding by his mother’s strictures was a burden he had to bear. “Mum says it’s not easy for a man to find his way in the world after he comes out of prison, and we shouldn’t make it harder for him by turning his past mistakes into cheap gossip. She says as long as the Hancocks are okay with him, we should be, too.”
“I’d like to meet your mother,” I said, quelling my hunger for cheap gossip. “She sounds like a wise woman.”
“Do you think so?” he said doubtfully.
“I do,” I declared on behalf of all mothers everywhere.
“Dad says I get my brains from her,” said Kenneth. “She’s a statistician. Dad’s a poet.”
Aunt Dimity and the King's Ransom Page 9