by Ruth Ware
It had come to be true in the end.
You know nothing about me! she wanted to shout back through the sitting room door.
She walked back slowly through the conservatory, wondering what to do until the others came down. Outside she could see, dimly, through the green mold on the panes, the lawn stretching down to the sea, and beyond it the windswept yews, the ones farthest from the house half bent over by the continual sea wind. The magpies were strutting on the lawn, and Hal thought of the rhyme that Mr. Treswick had recited yesterday. She couldn’t make out the number of birds through the clouded glass, but there must be at least seven, maybe more, and it seemed suddenly right—in this house full of secrets.
Well, it was very plain she wasn’t going to get any answers from Mrs. Warren. The hoover was still humming from behind the sitting room door, but Hal no longer had any faith in her ability to plumb the housekeeper for information, even when she emerged. And the rest of the house was quiet. But perhaps she could use this interlude to her advantage.
Stepping softly, she opened the third door leading out from the conservatory. It led into a small hallway, with a toilet opening off one side of it, the cistern dripping hollowly, and on the other side of it a door, firmly closed.
Hal glanced behind her, thinking of Mrs. Warren’s accusations of poking and prying, but the vacuum cleaner was still going, and with a defiant spurt of adrenaline she reached out and turned the handle. She slipped inside, and closed the door behind her, as quietly as she could.
It was a study—but one that had plainly not been used in many years. Dust was thick on the books, cobwebs skeined across the desk blotter, and the telephone that rested on the desk was yellowed Bakelite of the kind Hal had only seen in films. There was a cracked leather book on the desk embossed with the words Diary Planner in faded gilt lettering, and very, very gently, Hal opened the cover. Desk diary and day planner 1979, she read. It was older than Hal herself. When she let the cover fall back, it made a sound like a soft thud, and a little cloud of dust rose up.
Whose room had this been? It was profoundly masculine in a way Hal couldn’t quite define, and she could not imagine Mrs. Westaway using it, somehow. Was it Mr. Westaway’s? What had happened to him?
She leafed through the desk diary for a few pages, hoping something useful might leap out at her—Maud’s birthday seemed too good to hope for, but there might be some nugget of information she could use to her advantage. But the writing was so crabbed it was hard to make anything out, and those notes she did decipher were resolutely unpromising and businesslike—CF meeting . . . Telephone Webber . . . 12.30 Mr Woeburn, Barclays.
Hal closed it gently and turned her attention to the rest of the study. Opposite the desk were shelves of books, rising to the ceiling, as dusty and cobwebbed as everything else—all except, Hal suddenly noticed, for one volume, tucked away at the far top right, a slim anonymous book with a buttercup-yellow spine.
Beneath it was a set of wooden steps, designed for reaching the top shelves, and looking closer Hal could see that there was a footprint in the dust—still dusty itself, to be sure, but not the thirty years of dust covering the rest of the study.
Hal cocked her head, listening to the vacuum cleaner going back and forth, back and forth, and then climbed up the steps to retrieve the book, trying to set her feet as closely as possible within the other person’s prints.
It was a photograph album—she could tell that as soon as she took it down. As she opened it the thick pages creaked gently, the plastic film that covered the pictures unsticking with reluctance.
The first page held a black-and-white snapshot of a fat blond baby in an old-fashioned stroller and a miniature Aran sweater, staring blurrily out to the camera. There was a lawn behind him, falling away to the sea, and Hal recognized the view as the top terrace at Trepassen, just outside the drawing room. Harding, 1965 was written in neat pencil across one corner.
Hal turned the pages, feeling like a time traveler tiptoeing through the past. There was a little boy aged about two on the beach below the house, and another of him sat on the lap of a stiff, formal-looking man with a bristly mustache. The boy was presumably Harding, but who was the man? Mr. Westaway?
More photographs, a color snap of the same little boy, a little older this time, on a blue tricycle. H, June 1969, read the caption. Next came Harding in a school uniform, knock-kneed in his gray shorts, and then another baby appeared, red-faced and newborn. Maud? For a second Hal felt her heart leap as she looked to the penciled caption beneath for a date. But no—it read Abel Leonard born 13th March 1972. On the facing page was a black-and-white picture of the same baby lying on a hearthrug, kicking his little legs. A.L. 3 months, said the caption.
But before she could turn the page, a noise made her freeze. There were voices filtering in through the hallway—not Mrs. Warren, by the sound of it, but members of the family. And they were coming closer.
She must not be found in here, poking through the family papers.
Hastily, Hal shoved the book back into place and scrambled down the ladder, less careful this time about where she put her feet, and then stood at the bottom, holding her breath as she tried to work out where the voices were coming from. At first her heart was thudding too much to make it out. Then she heard, “Mrs. Warren! How might one obtain some coffee?” and realized they were coming from the breakfast room.
Quickly Hal slipped out of the study, closing the door behind her, and hurried through the little hallway. She was just in time—no sooner had she entered the conservatory than the door to the breakfast room opened and Harding’s head stuck out.
“Mrs.—” He broke off. “Oh, Harriet.”
“Yes,” Hal said, slightly breathlessly. There was dust on her fingers, she saw, from the study, and she wiped them surreptitiously on the back of her jeans. “I was just passing the time in here until eight—Mrs. Warren said breakfast would be served then.”
“Well, you’d better come through,” Harding said. There was something awkward in his manner, and he coughed and picked an imaginary speck of dust off his blue golfing pullover before adding, “About last night, Harriet, naturally the news was a shock, but I hope you didn’t—”
“Please,” Hal managed. She felt a betraying flush rise up her cheeks. “There’s no need—”
But Harding was going to say his piece, no matter what, and Hal had no choice but to stand and endure a rather pompous little speech that basically amounted to an apology for his remarks last night.
“That’s not to say,” he finished up, “that I don’t still have some concerns about Mother’s state of mind. But I was wrong—very wrong—to suggest that that was any reflection on you, Harriet. If you have any involvement in this at all, it’s as an innocent bystander. Well, there we go.” He coughed and brushed at his sweater again. “Passing on to more pleasant things, I hope you’re feeling better?”
“Oh—oh yes,” Hal said, though her cheeks were still flushed. “Thank you. I feel completely fine. I’ll be able to travel today.”
“Travel today?” Harding raised his eyebrows. “There’s no question of that, my dear. Mr. Treswick needs to see all the beneficiaries in his office in Penzance, and in any case, there’s a great deal we need to sort out here.”
At the mention of the appointment with the lawyer, Hal felt her stomach lurch, as sickeningly as if the ground had dropped away beneath her feet. Of course she had known that there would be hoops and formalities, but somehow in her fantasies about how this would pan out, she had always imagined herself sending in her documents by post from a safe remove. That was before, though—when she had been imagining a legacy of a few thousand at most.
Now, with the entire estate hinging on her identity . . .
The prospect of having to go in person and actually stand there, heart thumping, while her papers were looked over, was not comforting. There would probably be questions too—specific ones that Harding, Abel, and Ezra had been too polite to put to he
r at their mother’s wake, and she would have no time to figure out plausible answers or pick her wording. What if Mr. Treswick realized his mistake while she was actually in his office? Would he call the police?
She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could find the right words, the door behind them slammed open, and Mrs. Warren appeared, stick in hand.
“Oh, Mrs. Warren,” Harding said, with an ingratiating smile. “We were just discussing breakfast. How kind of you to put out the toaster and so on—where can one obtain tea and coffee?”
“It’s not yet eight,” Mrs. Warren said stonily. Harding blinked, and Hal could tell he was doing his best not to look put-out.
“Well, I appreciate that, but it’s seven fifty-five—”
“What Harding means . . .” came a voice from behind them, and Hal turned to see Ezra standing in the doorway. He was unshaven and looked almost hungover, his clothes rumpled and his hair standing up on end; but as Hal watched, his mouth quirked into the most charmingly wry smile she could remember encountering, transforming his whole expression. “What he meant to say is, couldn’t we persuade you, Mrs. Warren, to let us take some of the work off your hands and see to our own tea?”
“Well,” Mrs. Warren said. She smoothed her hair with her free hand. “I don’t know about that, Mr. Ezra.” Her Cornish burr sounded suddenly stronger. “My kitchen is my kitchen. But I’ll see what I can do.”
She turned and disappeared back through the door at the end of the conservatory, and Ezra winked at Hal.
“Harriet. Good to see you vertical. That was quite a performance you put in last night.”
“I—” Hal felt herself flush. Quite a performance. The reference was clearly to her fainting fit, but the word was uncomfortably close to the truth. “I’m feeling much better.”
“Unusual to see you vertical at this hour, if it comes to that,” Harding said sourly.
“And very fortunate for you and your morning tea that I am, Harding. What’s the saying, something about flies and honey?”
“Flies be damned, she’s a cantankerous old bat. I don’t know why Mother put up with her all these years. I notice she’s walked away with her thirty thousand intact.”
“That’s hardly the point,” Ezra said. His smile had disappeared, and he looked at Harding with something pretty close to naked dislike. “And lower your voice, unless you want to have cold soup for the rest of the stay.”
“What do you mean, it’s hardly the point?”
“I mean, she was basically a carer to Mother for about fifteen years, for a peppercorn wage. You think we could have got a live-in nurse for the kind of money Mother paid Mrs. Warren? Thirty thousand seems like a pretty cheap price to pay to me.”
“It’s pretty rich to say ‘we’ could have got a nurse,” Harding said irritably. “I can’t see what you would know about the matter, given we haven’t seen you on these shores for the best part of twenty years. At least Abel had an excuse for cutting and running. Those of us who stuck around to see through our responsibilities—”
“You always were a sanctimonious shit,” Ezra said. He grinned, making a joke of the words, but there was no charm or humor in his expression this time, more the quality of a wolf baring its teeth. She held her breath, unsure of where this was going, but Harding didn’t reply; he simply rolled his eyes and turned away from his brother towards the breakfast room. When he got to the door, he held it open for Hal, standing punctiliously back until she had passed through.
Inside, Mitzi, Richard, and the two other children were seated at the end of the long table. Abel and Edward were nowhere to be seen.
“Harriet darling,” Mitzi said. She had put on lipstick this morning, and her mouth was incongruously cheerful against the muted, faded shades of the room, and the bleached morning light. “How are you feeling today?”
“Fine, thank you, Mitzi,” Hal said. She took the seat that Harding pulled out for her, between himself and Ezra, and sat down. “I’m not sure what happened last night—a mixture of cold and no food, I think.”
“Not to mention the shock,” Mitzi said. She pursed her lips disapprovingly as she reached for the muesli. “I don’t know what Mr. Treswick was thinking, springing the whole will situation on us like that.”
“Well, he had to tell us at some point,” Ezra said. He seemed to have recovered from his flash of irritation with Harding, and the smile was back in place, and more convincing now. “He probably thought it was better to rip the bandage off in one go, so to speak. Get it over with.”
“He should have prepared us,” Mitzi said stubbornly. “Particularly poor Harding.”
“Why poor Harding?” Ezra asked. He grinned across the table at Mitzi. “The rest of us are just as snubbed as him, you know. Or is it that much of a shock to be lumped in with us paupers?”
“Ezra,” Mitzi said, with the air of someone having her patience tested. “You haven’t been here, but Harding was certainly led to expect—”
“Tough when you’ve already put down the deposit on a new Land Rover,” Ezra said sympathetically.
“Now, look here,” Harding said, at the same time that Mitzi snapped, “Ezra, you are being deliberately provocative.”
Ezra only laughed, throwing back his head so that Hal could see the unshaven line of his jaw, and the hollow of his collarbone where his shirt was open at the neck.
Then he stood, threw down his napkin, and stretched until his shirttails came loose.
“Fuck it,” he said laconically, leaning across the table and picking up the piece of toast Richard was buttering on his plate. “This is a little more hypocrisy than I can cope with at breakfast. I’m going out.”
“Out where?” Mitzi demanded, but Ezra didn’t seem to have heard her question. He took a giant bite of Richard’s toast, tossed the crust onto the table, and then strode out into the hall.
“He’s impossible!” Mitzi exploded, as the door slammed behind him. “Harding—are you going to let him get away with that?”
“Dammit, Mit. What do you want me to do?” Harding pushed away his plate. “Anyway, he’s right.”
“What do you mean? He stole Richard’s toast! And how dare he accuse you of hypocrisy!”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Harding stood, marched over to the toaster, and shoved in two more slices of bread. “Happy? The toast is hardly the most important thing here.”
“Accusing you of hypocrisy, then—what cheek!”
“I think that was a general remark, Mit—and much as I find him deeply irritating, he’s not wrong on that particular point, is he? All of us in that church yesterday, with our carefully glum faces—and I doubt there was one person there who was sorry she was gone.”
“How dare you.” The voice came from the doorway, and all heads at the table turned, to see Mrs. Warren standing in the doorway, a coffee jug trembling in one hand. “How dare you, you little sniveling good-for-nowt.”
“Mrs. Warren,” Harding said stiffly. He drew himself up to his full height. “What I said was intended for my wife, and in any case—”
“Don’t you ‘Mrs. Warren’ me, you despicable little arsehole,” she snarled, her Cornish accent somehow making the last word into a kind of foreign invective.
“Mrs.—” Harding began, but he didn’t get to finish. Mrs. Warren set down the coffeepot on the table with a crack that sent drops spattering across their plates, and slapped him around the back of the head, like a recalcitrant child.
Hal’s face felt frozen in shock. The whole scene was surreal—Harding standing there like a pompous schoolboy caught swearing in the corridor; Mrs. Warren, her face twisted with fury; Mitzi, Richard, and the other children wide-eyed with shock.
“Mrs. Warren!” Harding bellowed furiously, rubbing the back of his head, and at the same time his daughter called out, “Daddy!” and then, when her father did not respond, more urgently, “Daddy! The toast!”
They all turned to look at the ancient toaster on the end of the table, to
see smoke pouring out of the opening at the top. As Hal watched in horror, the blackened slices burst into flames.
“That goddamn thing!” Harding roared. “It’s a death trap—Mother should have thrown it away years ago.” He marched across to the wall socket, pulled out the plug, and then threw a place mat over the smoking toaster. The flames went out. A strong smell of singed cotton joined the scent of burned toast, and Mitzi let out a shuddering breath.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! Is there nothing reliable in this house? Mrs. Warren, can you—”
But then she stopped, breaking off in exasperation. Mrs. Warren had gone.
CHAPTER 18
* * *
The rest of breakfast had a stifled, edgy quality, as if no one wanted to refer to Mrs. Warren’s outburst and Ezra’s disappearance; and although she knew she should have been using the time to winkle out vital facts about Maud before her interview with Mr. Treswick, Hal found herself bolting down her toast, and then excusing herself from the table as fast as possible.
In the hall outside she paused for a moment, trying to decide what to do. She had no desire to go back up to that coffin-like bedroom, but wandering around the house as if she already owned the place felt painfully presumptuous.
She needed to get out, clear her head, try to work out her next move.