The Missing Years

by Lexie Elliott

  “Wait . . .” She is nodding beside me as the penny drops inside my head. “No! Ali’s dad, I’m guessing?”

  “The very same.” She glances across at me, which worries me slightly, as she needs to make a turn up ahead. “Does that make any sense to you?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” But I’m beginning to have an inkling.

  “Well, he’s coming to the funeral, apparently, whenever it happens.” The police haven’t released my father’s bones yet. “You can speak to him then.” She glances across again. “Does it feel different? Knowing after all this time your father is dead? That he didn’t . . .”

  “Abandon me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess it does.” I feel lighter, somehow, though that could be due to no longer being slowly poisoned. “Though it also makes me feel bad for ever having doubted him.”

  “Don’t be silly. Anyone would have, under the circumstances.”

  “Maybe.” Logically she’s right, of course she’s right. But it may take some time to reconcile that within myself.

  We’re turning into the driveway now, with its familiar crunching gravel. Carrie doesn’t so much park as stall the car, but I’m too busy looking at the Manse to comment. “Are you sure about coming back here? We could still go to the McCues’ place instead.”

  “I’m sure.” The words sound clear, definitive. Believable, even. “Wait—are you okay being here?”

  “I’m fine,” she says unequivocally. “I wasn’t the one forced to lie in bed with my father’s remains.”

  “I bet Jean is having a field day with that bit of gossip.” But I’m talking to delay the inevitable. I climb out of the car carefully, my eyes fixed on the building. It knows I am here. I can sense the thrum that goes through it, just beyond the range of hearing.

  Carrie grabs my bag for me and heads for the front door. “The boiler was replaced yesterday,” she says. “Bryn lit a rocket under the company.”

  “Bryn? First-name terms?”

  She shrugs. “He’s been really great. Fi thinks so too, which is saying something, given her past experiences with the police. Though we’re all starting to wonder how much of that was Jamie’s doing. It’s all coming out now; he was quite the master of spin. It was so easy for him to blame Fi, given she couldn’t defend herself.”

  I don’t allow myself to hesitate at the front door. I step straight in, though I feel like I’m waiting for something, but what, I don’t know. There’s an odd smell in the corridor leading to the kitchen. Toast says it’s okay, I remind myself. Then I consider the lunacy of relying on a small boy who believes he understands what his dog is thinking.

  “Ta-da!” says Carrie. The kitchen is not the kitchen, or not the kitchen I expect. The walls have been painted white, except for one, which is the purple of the swatch I selected. The linoleum on the floor has been completely replaced with some kind of faux tiling—not quite what I would have chosen but perfectly inoffensive, and absolutely preferable to what must have been left there after they moved Jamie’s body. I look at the spot where he lay, and there’s nothing there. I reach out a hand to one of the walls. “I wouldn’t touch,” warns Carrie hastily. “I’m not sure it’s dry yet. Ben and Ali worked all night after the forensics unit finished up. They couldn’t start the painting until the plaster was dry where the shotgun had blasted the ceiling . . .” She trails off, as if remembering, then turns to me. “Is it . . . is it okay? Do you like it?”

  “I love it.” It’s hard to speak.

  “It made them feel better. Neither of them can believe they hadn’t realized what Jamie was really like. And what with Ali’s mum, too—you know,” she says thoughtfully, “if you are planning to stay for good, I think you could do pretty well out of this if you really milk it.” I laugh, as she means me to, and it warms her gray eyes, which warms me too. “Tea?” she asks.

  I leave her making the tea, ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but really to walk through the Manse. It feels different, but Carrie is here. I can’t tell how I feel about it with her pottering in the kitchen. Belatedly it occurs to me that I missed her real question: If you are planning to stay . . . I know what I want to do, but I don’t know for sure if the Manse wants me. In the dining room, I cautiously touch my fingertips to the golden lettering, ready to snatch them away at the slightest hint of a buzzing in my ears, but the inscription remains inert. A furnace: I wonder again what kind of love my parents had. Enough to marry, enough to have me, but beyond that, neither of them can ever tell me. Though perhaps I should see that as a gift: I have a clean slate, with no pattern to fall into. Any mistakes I make will be my own.

  In the middle of the night, I wake with the pain from my collarbone gnawing at my consciousness, and lie still for a while, listening for sounds. There’s the low hum of a car engine that must be coming from the main road a couple of miles away. It dies away into silence, and somehow I can feel that silence; I can feel the space that extends beyond me in my bed, the way the landscape within which the Manse sits spreads out and soars. The Manse itself doesn’t feel silent, even though I can’t hear anything. It feels like it’s breathing steadily—not at any pitch my ears can detect, but I hear it nonetheless. It’s reassuring, like the feeling of a cat purring on your lap.

  Eventually I realize I won’t go back to sleep without a painkiller, or ten, and reluctantly leave my bed. Now that summer is just around the corner, the wood of the stairs holds no chill for my bare feet. The faint green light of the alarm panel glows reassuringly at me when I pass it. I lay a hand tentatively on the doorframe of the kitchen. The Manse doesn’t stir.

  In the kitchen I smile inadvertently at my purple wall, then fill a glass at the tap, looking out over the back lawn. A flash of red catches my eye: a fox. He trots insouciantly across the back lawn, pausing halfway to turn his head toward the house. But whatever has caught his attention is too inconsequential to delay him and he resumes his journey, leaping lightly onto the wall to exit the garden. I breathe out slowly when he’s gone, only now aware I’ve been holding my breath. Then I take two painkillers and go straight to bed.

  In the morning, I tell Carrie that I’m staying, that I’ll get some kind of producing job in Glasgow, that I won’t be selling the Manse. And that she’s welcome to call it home for as long as she likes.

  My father is dead. There is no longer a myriad of possibilities for my father’s life: all that could have been, might have been, has collapsed to nothingness, because my father is dead, because he has always been dead. There’s a clear-eyed solidity to that knowledge that might, in time, give me more peace than all the lives I could invent, but not just yet. I’ve lived with those lives for a long time; I’ve scoured each of them for what they might tell me about myself. I am grieving for them, too.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  There’s an inquest for Jamie, which records a verdict of lawful killing. That seems remarkably apt. But the inquest can’t answer the questions that really matter. Like when did he lose his grip on reality, or did he never really have one? Were there signs, and if so, how were they missed? Glen is the most troubled by it; Fi says he picks over it constantly. He blames himself for being too hard on him, or for not being hard enough when Jamie twisted facts against his sister—half sister. I don’t think she has told him that she saw it coming. I’m not sure he would forgive her for keeping that to herself. For that matter, I’m not sure all of me forgives her either. My splintered selves have mostly amalgamated, but the one that always watches Fiona can’t seem to fully merge. It sits like a shadow behind my shoulder even as Fiona spends more and more time at the house, something I don’t begrudge in the slightest, because she and Carrie are so lit up by each other that it warms those around them. And both Carrie and I can see that the Manse itself is a tonic to Fiona. She can almost keep time when she’s there.

  There’s an inquest for my father, too, which concludes “death by mis
adventure,” though nobody can say for sure what his misadventure might have been. Perhaps when he discovered the flat battery he left the airport by taxi, or perhaps by bus or train. Perhaps he wanted to put off another fight with his wife and went for a walk up by the falls, or perhaps he was researching the memorial. Did he slip and hit his head, or suffer a heart attack? His bones weren’t inclined to say.

  The funeral of Martin Calder takes place two weeks later. Pete flies up for it; there are no malevolent volcanos thwarting plane travel. Carrie helps me buy a black dress and heels, then lends me some “statement” jewelry that somehow makes the dress a thousand times more stylish. Glen gives a eulogy, and this time I give credit to what he says about his old friend. Carrie holds my hand, and I wish beyond reason that I had been at my mother’s funeral to hold hers, but I don’t cry until Callum leaves his mum to sneak his little hand into my free one. And then it’s hard to stop.

  We invite everyone back to the Manse for the wake. If I was being uncharitable, I might say that half the villagers have come purely to get a peek inside the Manse, and the other half out of guilt at thinking my father was a thief, but I don’t feel uncharitable. I’m too overwhelmed by the enormous number of people who have made an effort to honor his memory. At one point I squeeze through the crush to find Ali and Ben in dark suits by the kitchen table, laying waste to the salmon sandwiches. “You two scrub up well.” My smile may be tenuous, but it’s genuine.

  “I could say the same about you.” Ben gives me a one-armed hug on account of the other hand being occupied by food.

  “It’s the sling that really makes the outfit,” says Ali, through a mouthful. He’s not a hugger; I’ve learned that now. Occasionally he manages a squeeze of the arm. Occasionally. He nods at my shoulder. “How’s it doing?”

  “It’s just annoying more than anything else. I hate that I can’t drive.”

  “She has to rely on help from other people,” says Carrie, coming up from behind me to slip an arm round my waist. “She can’t be totally independent. It’s a learning experience for her; she has to trust.” I wrinkle my nose at her and she laughs.

  “My dad’s been looking to speak to you,” Ali says, in a quiet aside, as Ben asks Carrie something about her play. “But maybe now is not the time.”

  “Do you know what it’s about?” My words are equally quiet. I noticed a big man in his sixties next to Ali in the service; I’ve been expecting this. We’ve both been expecting this. Ali’s jerky gaze flickers around my face.

  “Aye. He spoke to me.”

  “Is it what we thought? Was he . . . Were they . . .” I make some kind of gesture, but he breaks in abruptly.

  “He should tell you.”

  “I’d rather you did, actually.”

  “Oh.” He thinks about it for a second. “Then . . . aye.”

  “Aye, you’ll tell me, or aye—”

  “Aye, they were having a torrid extramarital affair.”

  “Oh.” Even though I’ve been expecting it, even though it was the only thing that could make sense of Morag’s hatred of my mother and the return of a potentially valuable painting, I have to let that soak in for a minute. My mother and his father. My mother sleeping with her husband’s boss; his father sleeping with his employee’s wife. Unwise, in the extreme. Neither of them could have been happy with who they were to choose to do that.

  “Are you okay?” Ali asks. “He doesnae know anything about what happened to your dad, if you’re wondering.”

  “God, I never thought that.” It occurs to me for the first time that for all those years that my father has been missing, I’ve never once thought that my mother was directly responsible. It would have been logical perhaps to wonder if she’d killed him—it would be logical to wonder it now—but I never have. I feel a little lighter, realizing that. “Are you okay?” The flippant words—torrid extramarital affair—lead me to suspect he isn’t quite at peace with it yet.

  He shrugs. “Like I told you, I always knew there must have been someone.” But his face is bleak, and his heavy eyebrows almost obscure his eyes.

  “Do you think he’ll want the painting back now? It must be worth a bit.” Even if he still can’t bear to look at it, he could always sell it.

  “Ask him.” Over Ali’s shoulder I see Glen. There’s nothing I can put my finger on, but somehow his years are sitting heavier on his frame, though at least he looks less hollow cheeked than at Jamie’s funeral. Ali follows my eyes. “He’s in a bad way, right enough.”

  “I know.” A thought occurs to me. “Ali, would you do something for me?”

  “It’s your father’s funeral. I cannae exactly say no.”

  “That’s the spirit. Come with me.” I drag him through the crowd to Glen, who can barely meet my eye. “Glen, have you got a minute?”

  I lead them both into the dining room, where my father’s research box lies on a sideboard. “Glen’s seen this, but Ali, I thought you might be interested.”

  “What is it?” He picks up the jotter I hand him and starts to leaf through, then looks up with dawning realization. “Who did this?” I knew he’d be intrigued.

  “Martin,” says Glen.

  “This is detailed stuff.” He turns a couple of pages. “This must have taken him ages.”

  “There’s photocopies of papers, and all sorts of related articles—oh, and there’s these, too.” I hold out the aerial photos. Glen explains about Martin’s theories on the memorial, and about us looking in vain for the path.

  “But it’s not a path,” Ali says immediately, squinting at the photo. “It’s a negative crop-mark. You can only see this sort of thing from the air. You get positive crop-marks over old ditches and trenches, where the soil is deeper so the plants get better irrigation and nutrients, and the opposite over walls and foundations. The negative crop-marks are harder to spot; you’re lucky this photo was taken in the summer.”

  “How d’you ken all that?” Glen asks him, visibly impressed.

  Ali shrugs. “I watch a lot of documentaries. Mum likes them.” He glances at me quickly, as if checking my reaction to the mention of Morag, and then looks again at the photo, this time with rising excitement. “Ailsa, this might be where the kirk was. You should dig. This could really be something.”

  “You two should dig. And if anything comes out of it, my dad’s name goes on it too.”

  Glen and Ali look at each other. “Aye,” Glen says gruffly. “I’m game if you are, Ali.”

  “Of course I’m game.” He turns to Glen. “It might be nothing, but if it is the kirk, I wonder how the loch came to be there? Was a river maybe diverted? And if so, when?”

  I’m about to leave them to it, but I find myself turning back. “You should try and get up by the falls, too. In case he was right about the memorial.” I showed Fi the entry in my father’s notes only a few days ago. Callum McCue; what a funny coincidence, I said casually. I don’t know what reaction I was expecting, but she simply nodded.

  “Aye, lass, if it’s safe,” says Glen agreeably, his eyes still on the photos.

  I bite my lip to keep from insisting, but Ali has caught a glimpse of my face. “We will, Ailsa,” he says quietly. “I’ll find a way.”

  I leave them to it.

  Later, Bryn finds me outside, leaning against the Manse, purportedly watching Callum and Toast playing in the front garden. I haven’t seen Bryn since he visited me in the hospital, though we’ve spoken on the phone a few times. He’s in a suit, of course—not black; dark gray instead—but this one seems to fit. Perhaps he bought it very recently. “How are you doing?” he asks, squinting a little against the bright light. His face seems healthily lean now, rather than gaunt, and he has more freckles and more color than I remember. His hair could be any part of the brown spectrum—auburn, sandy, chestnut, plain old brown—depending on the light, but his eyes are a definitive pale blue
.

  “Everyone is asking me that. Right after they tell me what a lovely service it was.”

  He tips his head, the smallest of movements. “Well, it was. And they all care. Which is surely preferable to the alternative . . .”

  He’s teasing me. Very gently, but he’s teasing me. I stick my tongue out at him.

  “How about I ask you something different then? It’s probably not the right time, but life is short.” He grimaces. “As days like this prove.”

  I’m intrigued. “Go on, then.”

  “Are you still with Jonathan Powell?”

  “Oh.” My head swings round to him. Bryn doesn’t falter under the weight of my full attention. I’m starting to think I know where this is heading. “Um. Actually, no.”

  “Would you like to get a drink sometime?” His eyes are smiling in the way that I can only detect now that I know him better. It’s exactly the kind of invitation that I think it is.

  “I’d quite like to get a drink now.”

  His mouth curls up at the corners. I like that I made it do that. “I’m not sure absconding on all these guests is really the best idea.” He pauses. “But I can hang around until they’ve gone if you want me to.”

  “I’d like that.” We watch the small boy and his dog playing together for a minute. Callum is throwing a Frisbee, and Toast is leaping for it, twisting with incredible agility in the air to snap at it, yet somehow the Frisbee remains in pristine condition. I close my eyes and tip my head back against the stone of the house. The sun has a warmth to it that cuts through the breeze, a promise of summer to come. I may have more freckles of my own after today. “My father died,” I say quietly to Bryn, opening my eyes. It occurs to me that I may be standing exactly where my father was in the photo I have of him.

  Bryn nods. “I know.”

  “And my mother.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”