He heard the lamp being switched on and felt the bed shift as she sat down.
“May I see you? Come now, you’ll suffocate under there.”
“Go away.”
When Samuel didn’t lower the blanket, Ruth’s fingers curled around the covers and, in her own firm way, forced them below the boy’s eyes.
“Much better.” She pushed the hair from Samuel’s forehead and her touch was surprisingly tender. “What is making you cry so? Tell me what’s the matter and I’ll try my best to fix it.”
“Where is my mother?”
“Oh, Samuel, you know where she is. She’s in America trying to—”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”
Samuel thought she sounded more cross than sorry.
“You’ve worked yourself into a terrible state over heaven knows what,” she said. “Why would I lie about where your mother is?”
The boy lowered the blanket just under his chin and though he couldn’t look at Ruth—that was asking too much—the words found their way out. “Because you killed her.”
“Killed her?” Ruth let out a gasp, which turned into a faint chuckle. “Well, for goodness’ sake! I’ve been accused of wrongdoing in my life, and sometimes for good reason, but murder has never been one of my sins.” She peered down at Samuel. “Where did you get such an idea?”
“You won’t let me see the cellar.” He didn’t think it right to mention Joseph or the story of the murderous housekeeper. “And I know why you won’t because that’s where Mother is...that’s where you put her after you killed her.”
Samuel was crying now, his face buckled in grief, and he wanted nothing more than to dissolve into the bed. So he did the next best thing, pulling the covers over his face again.
“Enough.” Ruth pulled the blanket down. “Who has put these ideas into your head? Who’s making you think such nonsense?”
Samuel didn’t answer.
“Is it that fool of a boy Joseph Collins?”
“No. I can think for myself.”
“Well, if that’s so, your thinking is leading you astray.”
“Mother wouldn’t stay away for all this time, not if she could help it. Something’s happened to her, I know it has. She wants to be here, she wants to be with me, but she can’t because she’s rotting in the cellar.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’d been at the demon drink.” Ruth shifted on the bed and put her arms on either side of Samuel. “I have not killed your mother and I haven’t put her down in the cellar. She’s in America and very much alive, just like I’ve been telling you. Haven’t you been getting those lovely cards?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t your mother tell you about the bankers in America that she hoped might be able to help with the factory?”
“Yes.”
Ruth nodded. “Well, then?”
“She’s been gone too long.” He wiped his eyes as if that would stop the tears. “She didn’t even say goodbye.”
“Like I’ve told you too many times to count, it was all last-minute and your mother had to get to London by morning to catch the boat. If she had any idea how much it has upset you, I’m sure she’d feel wretched.” Ruth sighed. “You miss her very much, I know that. You don’t think I miss her, too? Every day I wish she were here, believe me, Samuel. She’s like a force of nature, your mother, whizzing about the house turning everything upside down. I know I’m a poor substitute for a real mother, or a father, God rest his soul. But I’m doing the best I can, Samuel, and I don’t pretend to be perfect... Sometimes things get said and done that we wish hadn’t been said or done. But as I say, I’m doing the best I can. Do you understand?”
Samuel didn’t offer a reply.
“I can’t say how much longer your mother will be gone but I have a feeling you’ll be hearing word from her very soon.”
“I hope so,” said the boy.
“Now let that be an end to it.” Ruth stood up and tightened the cord of her dressing gown. “Friends?”
The boy felt there was little choice but to nod.
“Good. Now off to sleep.”
She switched off the lamp, and in the half-light of the room, Samuel watched her silhouette move toward the door as if she were floating. She seemed to slow at the door, appearing to look back at him, but in the next breath, hardly the blink of an eye, was gone.
14
Samuel looked down at his plate, scrambled eggs and two sausages, wondering if a murderer could have made his favorite breakfast? Wasn’t that a kind thing to do and very unlike a killer? But then he thought that in the whole history of the world, there must have been plenty of fine cooks who had murdered people and hidden their bodies.
“You’ve hardly touched your eggs.” Ruth plunged the mop into the bucket and swished it about. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“I am.” He wasn’t. Samuel was sitting at the kitchen table, in his usual place, but his eyes kept shifting across to the larder.
“I suggest you get on with it, then,” said Ruth from behind him. “Your breakfast isn’t going to fly up into your mouth unaided and you’ve still got to wash your face, comb your hair and change into your school uniform. All in the next twenty minutes.”
“Yes, Ruth.” Samuel made himself take another bite of food but it tasted like sand. How could he eat breakfast like nothing was the matter, when everything was?
“Don’t forget to fetch your clean socks from the laundry,” Ruth said. “I shudder to think what you get up to at school—all three pairs are full of holes. I’ve stitched them up as best I can, though I’m the first to admit, sewing isn’t one of my gifts.” She chuckled, which only added to Samuel’s suspicions. “Mind you, I’d need to be a surgeon to mend some of those holes.”
She pushed the mop across the floor and Samuel watched as it slithered over the pale stone like a hundred eels all moving as one. Even this made him think of his mother—he pictured the water rising in the cellar, dirty and cold, and washing over her. She was in the yellow dress she loved so much with the ivy along the trim, floating in the gray water, her eyes closed, her face white as snow, her lips a charcoal red.
He didn’t want to believe his mother was dead. He wanted to believe what Ruth had told him—how she missed his mother, too, and how murder was not one of her sins. She looked so sure and calm when she spoke and wasn’t it true that Ruth was about the most sensible person Samuel knew? And would a sensible person murder her employer and then hide the body in the cellar? He didn’t imagine so.
But Joseph had said that some people were utterly bonkers and no one knew why.
For much of the night Samuel couldn’t sleep. He lay there, wanting to feel deep down in his belly that Ruth was innocent, wanting the knot that was twisted there, all tangled up in the many days and nights his mother had been away from him, to slacken and unspool. He wasn’t sure what a person telling the truth looked like exactly, but he thought they might look just like Ruth, sitting on the edge of his bed telling him his mind was muddled. And there were the postcards to consider. They had come from America and the handwriting was definitely his mother’s. Didn’t that make more sense than Joseph’s story?
But he couldn’t get past the cellar. Why hadn’t Ruth let him see it? She knew how upset he was and she knew what he feared. So why not just unlock the door and prove that his mother wasn’t down there? If Ruth had just let him see, Samuel felt sure it would have blown the dark thoughts away like a snuffed candle.
“Samuel?” Ruth was standing over him, her hands crossed over each other, resting on top of the mop.
“Yes, Ruth?”
“Did you hear what I said about the socks?”
He nodded.
“Are you feeling sick?”
He shook his head.
“I have a headache, that’s all.”
“Shall I give you something?”
“It’s not that bad.”
Ruth felt his forehead with the back of her hand and then his cheeks. “You don’t have a fever.”
“I’m not sick,” said Samuel, his eyes once again returning to the larder.
“Well, your breakfast has gone cold and you’ve hardly eaten a morsel.” Ruth picked up the plate and carried it to the sink.
Samuel stood. “I’ll get ready for school.”
“Yes...good.”
The boy was almost at the door when Ruth called him back. She looked at him, her fingers touching the clover pin on her collar. “I know we settled things last night, about the cellar and all that nonsense concerning your mother. We did settle it, didn’t we?”
It wasn’t settled. Not one little bit. “Yes, Ruth.”
“That’s what I thought.” Ruth licked her lips. “But I was thinking, it might set your mind at ease, now that you’ve calmed down and are thinking clearly, if we went down there and had a look. What do you think?”
It was as if Ruth had reached into his mind. “Can we go now?”
“I don’t see why not.”
* * *
The key caught in the lock and wouldn’t budge. “Always gets stuck,” Ruth muttered. Samuel stood behind her—the larder was too narrow for him to stand anywhere else—and waited for the door to open, his chest tingling, the nerves swelling his eyes until they stung for want of blinking.
With all the color drained from her fingers and her teeth pressed together, Ruth twisted the key as hard as she could. The lock released a piercing screech and yielded. “Thank heavens for that.” Ruth glanced back at Samuel. “It’s been so long since I was down here, the lock’s awful rusted.”
“Don’t you come down when you need potatoes?” Samuel asked.
“Not always,” Ruth said. “Usually I keep what I need up here in the larder. What I meant was, the lock is stiff because it’s used so little. I’ll have William see to it.”
Ruth turned the handle and the narrow door swung open, leaving a black void in its place. “Pass me that flashlight, Samuel, before we both break our necks.”
Samuel grabbed his father’s flashlight off the shelf and passed it to Ruth. She turned it on, the pale beam practically swallowed up by the darkness. “Don’t you come down until I turn the light on.”
“I won’t fall.”
“Of course you won’t. Whoever heard of anyone falling down a set of stairs in the pitch-dark?” She huffed as if the answer was perfectly obvious. “Wait until I turn the light on.”
Wait? It took all of Samuel’s self-control not to push Ruth aside and run ahead of her that very second. As for waiting in the larder, that was impossible. Stepping over the small wooden rise, Ruth lowered her head and stepped in, her eyes trained on the wooden stairs that tracked down into the gloom.
“Careful does it,” she whispered.
Ruth began her descent and the boy followed quickly after her. She didn’t make a fuss about it, probably too busy watching her step. The stairs had no railing and so they both needed the wall to steady themselves.
The rough wooden treads were worn smooth but they still murmured and creaked as Samuel and Ruth went down. An odor of damp and mold and the slow decay of things shut up in a windowless pit rose to meet them.
“Watch yourself, Samuel.” Ruth had reached the bottom. “The last step catches you by surprise.”
Just as the boy stepped onto the cellar floor, Ruth located a length of cord hanging from the ceiling. A single, unadorned light bulb bloomed into life. Samuel stood somewhere in the middle of the room and turned, taking in every detail. The room was about half the size of the kitchen, stone walls dripping with moss, a bare floor, a low ceiling that Ruth could have reached up and touched.
“Well?” Ruth was looking at the boy like he was about the silliest creature she ever saw. “Do you see a body? A bloody ax? Any chopped-up limbs?”
The cellar was littered with wooden crates and cardboard boxes and an open shelf with just a few bottles of dusty wine. Samuel walked around the room, opening crates, lifting the lids of boxes and moving a pile of old potato sacks from a dim corner. He found unused pots and pans, parts of lanterns, a broken side table, a few clocks, coarse sheets covered in a rainbow of splatter and the paint tins and stiff brushes that had caused them. What he didn’t find, what wasn’t there at all, was his mother. And this fact left him with a kind of emptiness that buffeted his body like a cold wind. He was happy and thankful, of course he was, but that emptiness meant that these things had nowhere to set down.
Ruth let the flashlight slacken in her hand. “As I told you last night, there is nothing here that would be of any interest to you.”
That was true, Samuel had to admit, but there was something else, too. The cellar was just a smelly room full of discarded things, yet they were neatly organized. The crates against the wall, the boxes neatly clustered, even the floor was swept clean. Ruth would often say that the cellar was a mess she couldn’t bear thinking about. But it wasn’t a mess at all.
“Did you tidy up?” said Samuel.
The light from the bulb was rather harsh, making the most of the thin lines around Ruth’s eyes and mouth. “What?”
“It’s tidy.” Samuel looked about. “You said it was a great mess down here, but it’s tidy.”
Ruth sniffed. “You might consider this tidy, but I certainly don’t.”
Samuel had to admit that Ruth did have high standards when it came to what you might consider clean. “I just...”
“Samuel, look at me.”
The boy did as he was told.
“Do you see any signs that there has been a corpse hidden down here?”
Samuel didn’t offer a reply.
“Do I look like a crazed lunatic to you?”
That was very unfair because the boy had no experience with such things. Still, he couldn’t deny that they were fair questions. He had wanted to see the cellar and now he had.
“Your mother is in Boston,” said Ruth with calm certainty.
“I want her home.”
“Yes, but you wishing it won’t make it so. She’s in Boston and she’ll be there until things are sorted out with the steel mill.” She saw the deep set of the boy’s frown and it seemed to temper her resolve. “Of course, she might have completed her business and is sailing home this very moment.”
Samuel bit on his bottom lip. “You really think so?”
“It’s possible. I surely hope so.” Ruth rubbed her brow. “Though I can’t be certain, now can I? But I am sure about one thing—your mother is alive and well and one of these days she’ll come gliding through the front door and prove it to you.”
Ruth couldn’t have said a more wonderful thing if she had tried and Samuel saw no reason not to smile. “I think so, too,” he said.
* * *
Though the tugboat was barely an inch long it brimmed with authenticity. Like the much larger ship it belonged to, a replica of the RMS Queen Mary, the little boat was carved from wood in intricate detail and lovingly painted. The set belonged to Samuel’s father and was given to Samuel on his seventh birthday on the understanding that it came with tremendous responsibility. As such, it was kept up on the mantel in his bedroom and almost never played with, no matter how it might call to him, practically crying out to be a part of some violent shipwreck that would require his whole battalion of fighter planes spiriting to the rescue.
The Queen Mary was still on the mantel, being much too big for what Samuel had in mind, but one of the four small tugboats that went with the set was nestled in the po
cket of his school blazer. Samuel was still panting, having run all the way from his bedroom down to his mother’s study. He moved swiftly now, arranging the postcards around the atlas. With only a few minutes until he set off for school he had to be quick. And what he planned simply couldn’t wait until the afternoon—not when this new certainty was swelling in his chest, demanding something solid that would carry him through the coming days as he waited for his mother to come home. And she was coming home. She was on the ship right that very moment, Ruth had practically guaranteed it.
Samuel picked up the coil of red yarn that he had taken from Ruth’s sewing kit (there wasn’t time to ask permission and there was no harm in it) and began pulling on the thread. The postcards were turned over and arranged in chronological order, though the boy didn’t need to see the picture of each city to know the locations. Still, he checked, anyway, rattling off his mother’s journey one destination at a time. With enormous care, Samuel began twisting the red yarn around the pin stuck in San Francisco. That was the first city his mother had visited. When it was secured to his satisfaction, he unspooled the yarn and pulled it toward Texas, winding it around the pin planted in the heart of Dallas. On and on he went, his nimble fingers working at speed, threading the red yarn across the atlas—back to California (this time Los Angeles), then on to Florida, Pennsylvania, Toronto, New York City, and only stopping once he had reached Boston.
The boy dug the tugboat out of his pocket. It wasn’t exactly an ocean liner, not like the one his mother would be on, but it would do just as well. Samuel bit down on the yarn, severing it from the coil. Then he tied the end of the thread around the tugboat and placed it carefully on the atlas right over Boston Harbor. A grin pulled at his lips as Samuel pushed the boat out across the sea.
The little tugboat was bound for England and this thought shook the boy with a hope so fierce it made his eyes sting and flood with no thought for his dignity. But even this childish outburst was a blessing—for as a film of tears blurred Samuel’s vision, he could just about see the blue of the page begin to ripple and churn, dissolving into a tide, the tugboat carving its way through majestic waters. It felt wrong to call it an atlas now, foolish, too, for it was really a world in miniature, and the story that it told was nothing short of wondrous. His mother was at sea, even as he was standing there in her study. He could see her out there on the ship’s deck, clutching the railing and looking heartsick as she stared into the salty mist. She was saying his name over and over like the words of a treasured poem, laden with thoughts of her little man, and counting the days, minutes and hours until she was back home with him.
The Boy at the Keyhole Page 7