Aunt Bessie Goes (An Isle of Man Cozy Mystery Book 7)

by Diana Xarissa

  The rest of the evening was quiet. Bessie had toast with jam for her evening meal after her huge feast earlier. She settled into bed with a book of short stories in the hard-boiled detective genre that she rarely read. After a few stories, she drifted off to a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter Eight

  Saturday morning brought more rain, but Bessie enjoyed her walk anyway. It was one of those days where she felt as if she could walk for hours. At the foot of the stairs to Thie yn Traie, she stopped and looked at the huge house above her. All that she could see was windows, but she blinked when she realised there was a light on in one of them. It seemed unlikely that someone was viewing the house this early in the morning, but anything was possible.

  Bessie continued along the beach for a while longer before retracing her steps towards home. She knew she was soaked through, but today she didn’t mind. It better be dry tomorrow, she thought to herself, because I won’t be in this sort of mood again for a long time.

  The light was still on in the house she continued to think of as the Pierce mansion. Bessie made a mental note to ring her advocate, who was handling the sale of the estate, and then made her way home. A quick call to his office was reassuring.

  “There’s a builder and an interior designer going through the house this morning,” Breesha, Doncan’s secretary, told Bessie. “There’s a very interested party who’ve been around the place twice. Now they’re having a builder go through with their designer to see how much it would cost to make the changes they want to make.”

  “Please don’t tell me they want to make it bigger,” Bessie said, thinking of the sprawling wings that extended in every direction from the main house.

  “I’m not sure what they want to do,” Breesha told her. “I can put you through to Mr. Quayle if you want to ask him.”

  Bessie laughed. “He’d just tell me that I have to wait until it’s all a matter of public record,” she replied. “And he’s perfectly correct, if annoying.”

  “You should try working for him,” Breesha said, laughing.

  After the call, Bessie cleaned her loos, one of her least favourite jobs. After the delicious lunch the previous day, nothing Bessie had to hand sounded good, but she fixed herself some soup and toast and washed it down with several cups of tea. She was just curling up with a new book by a favourite author when someone knocked on her door.

  “Sam Radcliff, what brings you here?” Bessie asked. Sam was around fifteen, with long brown hair that needed combing quite badly and brown eyes that were now shifting nervously from side to side.

  “I, well, my mum and I have had a bit of a blowout and I was wondering if I could sleep in your spare room tonight,” the boy said.

  Bessie bit back a sigh. She never turned away a young guest, but she really wasn’t in the mood today for entertaining. Besides, young Sam had stayed with her before and he wasn’t exactly her favourite visitor.

  “Of course you can,” Bessie forced herself to say. “Actually, I’m glad you’re here. I have a few little chores that need doing and I wasn’t looking forward to doing them myself.”

  Sam frowned, but didn’t reply. Bessie smiled to herself as she showed the boy into the house.

  “I need to clean behind the appliances,” she told him. “But they’re far too heavy for me to move myself. Can you give me a hand?”

  “Sure,” Sam muttered, looking at the ground.

  Bessie directed him to the refrigerator, and with his grudging help, they slid it out a few feet. She knew she wasn’t being especially nice to the boy, but teens didn’t run to Bessie’s because she was nice and Bessie knew it. They came because she was a neutral party in the never-ending battle between teen and parent. She would listen, make a few pointed comments and then serve up tea and biscuits and delicious home-cooked meals. Sometimes the teens found themselves put to work, especially when Bessie thought they needed to be.

  “I really don’t think I can get back there,” Bessie mused now as she studied the space. “Would you mind terribly sliding back there and giving the floor and the back of the fridge a good clean?”

  She passed him some cleaning spray and a cloth and then stood by and directed his efforts until they met her standards. Once he’d climbed out, they slid the large appliance back into place and Bessie smiled at Sam.

  “How about some tea and a biscuit before we tackle the cooker?” she asked. That got Bessie a nod and a smile. She put the kettle on and then found a box of chocolate biscuits.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have anything homemade at the moment,” she told the boy. “Perhaps we could bake something together later.”

  “Store-bought is fine with me,” Sam told her, grabbing a biscuit off the plate and shoving it into his mouth.

  “Please wait until you’re at the table and seated and then take a biscuit or two and put them on your own plate before you start eating,” Bessie said. “My manners may be old-fashioned, but in my house they are the rule.”

  Sam flushed and plopped down into a chair. He waited with ill-concealed impatience as Bessie laid out small plates for them both. When she put the larger plate of biscuits in the middle of the table, he quickly took half a dozen and piled them on his plate.

  Bessie made the tea and then served it, before siting down across from Sam at the table.

  “So, what’s going on at home?” she asked in a gentle voice.

  “Mum got mad because I was fighting with my little brother,” Sam said with a shrug. “He’s just a big pain in the ar…, er, butt.”

  “As I was the little sister, I can’t possibly speak to how annoying younger siblings are, but surely you can understand your mother’s frustration?”

  Sam shook his head. “She always wants me to watch him. He’s only seven and he’s always getting into trouble. Mum blames me whenever he gets hurt.”

  Bessie bit back a sigh. She could sympathise with young Sam, who hadn’t chosen to have a little brother, after all.

  “Does she know you’re here?”

  “She won’t care where I am unless she has a date tonight,” Sam replied. “If she’s found some desperate loser to buy her dinner, then she’ll want me home to watch Jake.”

  “You mustn’t disrespect your mother like that,” Bessie said sternly. “Not in my house.”

  Sam shrugged. “Sorry,” he muttered, his mouth full of biscuit.

  “I shall have to ring her to let her know you’re here,” Bessie reminded him of her most important rule. She had realised long ago that welcoming the neighbourhood children could cause some trouble if she didn’t contact parents to let them know that their offspring were with her. Not only did it let the parents know the child was safe, it prevented children from saying they were going to stay with her and then doing something else altogether.

  “She’ll probably say no and I’ll have to go home,” Sam grumbled.

  “She’s let you stay before,” Bessie pointed out.

  “Yeah, but now you’ve been finding all these dead bodies,” Sam said. “Mum reckons you’re bad luck.”

  Bessie sat back in her seat, stunned. It had never occurred to her that the locals might stop letting their children spend time with her due to all the unfortunate recent events. She thought back over the last several months. She had had fewer visitors than was normal, now that she thought about it. The summer holidays were usually quiet, but things had been quiet in the early summer as well and young Sam was her first visitor since the schools had reopened.

  “Well, that’s unfortunate,” Bessie said after a moment. “I have had rather a run of, well, I guess bad luck is as good a way to put it as any, but none of it has been my fault, of course.”

  Sam shrugged again. “It’s her new sister-in-law that’s put the idea in her head,” he told Bessie. “Mum’s brother, Simon, he just got married again. Anyway, his new wife is from across and she was shocked that mum lets me stay with you at all, you not being family or anything. Apparently that simply isn’t how they do things in Shef
field.”

  The young man said the last sentence in a high-pitched voice and a posh accent that had Bessie laughing. “Now, now, you know you must respect your elders,” she said once she’d stopped laughing.

  Sam grinned. “She isn’t that much my elder,” he confided in Bessie. “I don’t think she’s much more than nineteen, and Simon is like forty or something.”

  Bessie smiled to herself at the way the teen said “forty” as if it were a hundred. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll ring your mother after we finish our tea and we’ll see what she says.”

  “If you want my help with the cooker, you better wait until we’ve done it before your ring her,” Sam suggested.

  “I’m less worried about my cooker than I am about your mother being worried,” Bessie replied.

  After the tea things had been washed and put away, Bessie rang Sam’s mum. The boy was right; she couldn’t be persuaded to let him stay.

  “Sorry, but I need him home tonight,” the woman said. “He’s got to watch Jakey for me.”

  “It’s probably true,” Sam said glumly. “Next time I’ll just get on the ferry and keep going.”

  Bessie did her best to persuade him to come to her again the next time he needed to get away, sighing deeply as she shut the door behind him. You can’t save them all, she reminded herself sadly. A few mental images flashed through her mind, young men and women who had once slept in her spare room who had later made what Bessie considered to be bad choices with their lives. Firmly pushing such sad thoughts from her mind, Bessie curled up with the book she had been about to start when Sam knocked.

  She was a few pages into it when she remembered that she’d meant to ring Inspector Rockwell after lunch. He wasn’t at the station. It was Saturday, after all, so Bessie rang Doona at home.

  “I was just trying to reach John to let him know what I’ve found out, although it isn’t much,” she told her friend. “Can you have him ring me?”

  “Sure,” Doona agreed. “I’d invite you for dinner, but I have a hot date tonight,” she added.

  “Do tell.”

  “It’s this guy I met at ShopFast,” Doona began.

  “Not Alan Collins,” Bessie interrupted.

  “No, not him,” Doona laughed. “His name is Kevin and he’s just moved to the island. We’re meeting at La Terrazza.”

  “Very nice, I look forward to hearing all about it.”

  Bessie hung up and looked in her refrigerator for something that appealed for her evening meal. The phone interrupted her frustration at finding nothing.

  “Bessie, why don’t you have my mobile number?” John asked when Bessie answered.

  “I thought I did, but I couldn’t find it,” Bessie replied. “And, of course, the station wouldn’t give it out. I didn’t think I should ask Doona to give it to me, either.”

  “Write this down,” the man instructed. Bessie jotted the number down and then repeated it back to him.

  “That’s right, now, what can I do for you?”

  “I just wanted to fill you in on what I’ve learned the last few days,” Bessie replied. “Although it isn’t much,” she added.

  She quickly ran through the conversations she’d had with everyone, telling him everything that she thought might be remotely connected to Adam and his disappearance. When she finished going through her lunch conversation with Mary, including her invitation to the furniture auction, she stopped. “That’s it,” she said with a sigh. “I know it isn’t much.”

  “Mary Quayle said I could come up and take a look around any day next week?” was John’s first question.

  “Yes,” Bessie replied, surprised.

  “Can you ring her and ask if we can meet her there at nine on Tuesday?” John asked.

  “Of course I can,” Bessie agreed. “I didn’t think you’d want to take advantage of the offer,” she found herself adding.

  “I don’t intend to take advantage of the offer,” John replied. “But I quite fancy having a little and very informal chat with Mrs. Quayle, preferably when her husband and her advocate aren’t around.”

  “Oh, I see,” Bessie said, feeling somehow even more surprised. “I’ll see if I can get that arranged, then.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” John told her. “Other than that, I guess we just need to wait for either the DNA results or Mark Carr to turn up.”

  Bessie hung up and spent a minute thinking about the call she was about to make. She just wanted to feel certain that she wasn’t being disloyal to her friend Mary in helping out her friend John. Knowing that Mary couldn’t possibly have anything to hide helped Bessie decide that it was fine.

  Mary was home and happy to agree to the arrangements. “I told you, I have to be there anyway. I’m starting in Tuesday morning with sorting things out. A man from the auction company should be there around ten, so nine is perfect. You can have a quick look before he gets there.”

  With that agreed, Bessie fixed herself something from the freezer and ate it while reading the book that had already been abandoned so many times. An hour later she put it aside to clean up the kitchen. Once done, she left that book on the table and went into the sitting room in search of something different.

  While she’d really enjoyed the previous books in that particular series, the author seemed to have decided to take the series in a different direction and Bessie wasn’t at all happy with his choice. She’d probably finish this book eventually, but she was going to cross him off her list of favourite authors unless the second half of it improved dramatically.

  She settled in with a history of Victorian England that she’d read dozens of times before. It was exactly what her brain was craving, apparently, because the next time she looked up it was past her bedtime.

  Sunday and Monday felt oddly normal to Bessie. There was a part of her that felt as if she should be doing something, anything, to help John figure out what had happened to the young man hidden in the King house and where Mark Carr was, but she simply couldn’t imagine what she could do. So, she walked and cooked and ate and cleaned and tidied and drank tea, all the while feeling as if something important was being missed.

  Tuesday morning was the first dry morning for several days and Bessie was disappointed when she had to cut her walk short. John was collecting her shortly after eight for the fairly long drive to Jurby. The distance wasn’t that great as the crow flies, but the roads didn’t exactly take a direct route.

  John was right on time, and Bessie was quick to lock up and join him at his car. He held the door for her and then climbed back into the driver’s seat.

  “How are you this morning?” John asked as they drove out of Laxey.

  “I’m fed up and frustrated,” Bessie said, surprising John with her honest answer to the standard question.

  “We should have the DNA results by the end of the week,” John told her. “That should help focus our investigation.”

  “Why does it take so long?” Bessie demanded.

  John shrugged. “You’d have to ask one of the experts,” he told her. “But once we get the results, if it is Adam, the older two King brothers will be coming across. They’ve been questioned already by their local forces, but I really want to talk to them myself.”

  “They were both living across by the time Adam left,” Bessie said. “What do you think they’ll be able to add?”

  “I’m not sure,” John admitted. “It’s all about filling in pieces of the puzzle.”

  “Mark Carr could probably put the whole thing together,” Bessie muttered.

  “We’re looking for him,” John told her. “In the meantime, we’ve heard back from immigration control in Australia and there’s no record of Adam King ever entering the country.”

  “They have records going back that far?” Bessie asked.

  “Yes, although a lot of it is on paper and not centrally located. That’s why it took so long for them to get back to us. They’ve checked from September 1967 through January 1969 for us. He cou
ld have taken a very scenic route, I suppose, and arrived there after that date, but we couldn’t very well ask them to check every record up to yesterday, now could we?”

  “Weren’t you tempted to do just that?” Bessie asked.

  “I was,” John told her. “But I know they’re just as overworked there as we are here. I was pushing it in asking for as much as I did. They could have told me to wait until the body was identified before asking. If it is Adam, they wasted their time.”

  The pair discussed island politics and the weather as they made their way north. John had a map of the island on the dashboard, but he didn’t need it until the last few miles.

  “Okay, I give up,” he said as they drove down a seemingly endless road in the middle of nowhere. “I thought I had the route memorised, but I must have missed a turning.”

  He pulled over and looked at the map for a moment and then smiled at Bessie. “Or we just haven’t quite reached the turning yet.”

  Bessie smiled at him. “I came up here once with Mary, when I was looking to furnish the flat in Douglas, but I haven’t the slightest idea which way she went. There’s never been anything in Jurby to tempt me to visit.”

  John nodded. “It’s my first trip up here,” he told her. “And I won’t rush back, I don’t think.”

  “I’ve known people who live up here, over the years,” Bessie told him. “And those that do, seem to really love it.”

  “It’s just a little too remote for my liking,” John replied.

  “You need to head up to the Point of Ayre,” Bessie said, referring to the northernmost point on the island. “If you want to feel like you’re at the end of the world, that’s the place to do it.”

  John nodded. “Someone else suggested that I should go up there,” he told her. “Just so I can say I saw it, I guess.”

  “It’s beautiful in its own way,” Bessie told him.

  “Maybe one day,” John replied. He slowed down now as he approached the junction with the side road he thought he’d missed. He made a careful left turn and Bessie smiled.