The Death of Mrs. Westaway

by Ruth Ware

  Very well, then. She had to puzzle this out, slowly and logically.

  There could not be that many suspects. Who could have been at Trepassen, that long summer? The brothers?

  The entry of December 6 was still open on her lap, describing the night her mother assumed she had conceived. Hal read it through again, and again, and this time she stopped at one phrase: Our eyes met—blue and dark.

  Hal’s mother had dark eyes, like her own. Which meant that whoever she’d slept with must have been a blue-eyed man.

  Ezra had dark eyes—uncompromisingly so.

  Abel . . . well, that was more difficult. He was fair, but his eyes . . . Hal shut her own, trying to remember. Grayish? Hazel?

  Blue eyes could look gray in the right light, but try as she might, she could not picture Abel’s kind, bearded face with blue eyes, nor could she imagine him in her mother’s arms. He would have said something, surely?

  In desperation she pulled the picture from her pocket—the one Abel had given her, taken the very afternoon that her mother had been writing about.

  There was Ezra, his dark head thrown back, laughing with an openness so at odds with his present-day cynicism that Hal thought her heart might break a little, his dark eyes just slits of merriment. There beside him was his twin, Maud, her fair hair cascading down her back.

  And there, too, was Abel, his dark-blond hair glinting in the sun. She peered closer, trying to make out his face, beneath the faded color and the frayed folds of age, as if she could see through the paper to the past, and the people left behind.

  Could it be? Could she be Abel’s child?

  In which case . . . she stopped, feeling something cold against the back of her neck, like a chilly hand laid there. If she was Abel’s daughter, the legacy might hold up. Was that why Mrs. Warren had said nothing? Because the legacy did belong to Hal?

  The thought should have been a welcome one, but for some reason it made her feel like the bottom of her stomach had fallen away.

  Before she folded up the picture to put it away, she looked very deliberately at the fourth person in the frame, at the one whose eyes she had been avoiding—at her mother, her dark eyes uncompromising, staring out at her through the years.

  What are you trying to say? Hal thought desperately. She felt her hands close on the old, fragile paper, the flecks of pigment disintegrating beneath her fingertips.

  What are you trying to tell me?

  It was as if her mother were looking out at her from the past, right at her.

  But no.

  Not at her.

  At . . .

  Hal’s fingers were shaking as she put the photograph down, very gently, and began flicking back through the pages of the diary, back, back . . . no, too far . . . forward . . .

  And there, at last, there it was.

  In the crumbling boathouse Maud untied the rickety flat-bottomed skiff, and we rowed out to the island, the lake water dappled and brown beneath the hull of the boat. Maud tied the boat to a makeshift jetty and we climbed out. It was Maud who went in first—a flash of scarlet against the gold-brown waters as she dived, long and shallow, from the end of the rotting wooden platform.

  “Come on, Ed,” she shouted, and he stood up, grinned at me, and then followed her to the water’s edge, and took a running jump.

  And then, just a few lines later:

  “Take a photo . . .” Maud said lazily, as she stretched, her tanned limbs honey-gold against the faded blue towel. “I want to remember today.”

  He gave a groan, but he stood obediently and went to fetch his camera, and set it up. I watched him as he stood behind it, adjusting the focus, fiddling with the lens cap.

  “Why so serious?” he said as he looked up, and I realised that I was frowning in concentration, trying to fix his face in my memory.

  Hal had imagined only four people in that scene: her mother, Maud, Ezra, and Abel—the four people in the photograph’s frame. But it was not quite the truth. Someone must have been taking the picture. And it was the person her mother was looking at. The same person she had gone down to the beach with later that evening. Her lover. Hal’s father.

  Hal stared at the photograph, meeting her mother’s fierce, direct gaze—and for the first time she read the intensity in those eyes as something else. Not suspicion. Not antagonism. But—longing.

  Of all the people in the photograph, her mother was the one who stared directly at the photographer, challenging him—whoever he was—with her eyes, locking his gaze.

  Hal had read that look quite differently—she had seen the connection between her mother and the viewer as their own relationship, as if her mother were gazing out of the past at her.

  But now she understood. It was not she herself that her mother was looking at—for how could she? It was the photographer. It was Hal’s father. Ed.

  CHAPTER 30

  * * *

  That night, Hal’s bed had never felt softer or more welcoming.

  She slid under the covers and shut her eyes, but sleep didn’t come. It wasn’t that she was not tired—she was, almost to the point of nausea. It wasn’t even the thought of Mr. Smith’s men. She had dragged a chest of drawers across the front door, and she didn’t think that even they would come in the middle of the night, risking waking all her neighbors, and the consequent 999 calls.

  What stopped her from sleeping was that every time she shut her eyes, she was back—between the pages of the diary, in the claustrophobia of that little room. The picture was so vivid: the narrow attic, the barred windows, the two metal bolts, top and bottom . . . when she shut her eyes, they rose up in front of her mind’s eye, as if she were back there herself, and she felt a kind of sick dread. Not just for her mother—who, after all, had escaped, and made her way here, to Brighton, and made a life for herself and her child away from Trepassen. But for those other children—for Abel and Ezra, locked in that room as children, as punishment for whatever childish misdeeds they’d committed. And most of all for Maud.

  The first few times Hal had read the entries, she had been looking for her mother—trying to picture the person behind the words, and compare them to her own memories. Then she had read it again, scouring it for mentions of the boy who might be her father. Ed. Edward? She found herself remembering that cool, handsome face, the appraising blue eyes, trying to pick out any features that might have belonged to her.

  Come on, Ed. The words rang inside her head as though her mother had shouted them aloud in the little room.

  Ed. It was a common enough name. There must be dozens of Edwards, Edgars, and Edwins scattered around Cornwall. And yet . . .

  All evening she had gone round and round, combing for other mentions that might give evidence either way, arguing for and against, back and forth. But her mother had kept her word, and apart from that small slip, every reference to her father’s name had been ripped out, or scored through.

  Now, though, in the stillness of the night, as Hal went back again and again over words she had committed to memory, she found herself looking for mentions not of Ed, but of Maud.

  Her own mother was oddly shadowy—perhaps it was because she spent so many of the entries describing others, but it was hard to match the uncertain, romantic girl writing this diary with the strong, practical woman she had become, after years of single motherhood. Without the evidence of her own eyes, Hal could never have imagined her mother writing with such heat and yearning about a man. Perhaps this was the first, and last, time.

  But Maud—Maud was different, somehow. Though she only flitted through the pages, she felt like a constant presence in the diary; and as the clock ticked past midnight, and the rain spattered at the window, Hal found herself scouring her memory for references to Maud.

  It was not just the fact that it was Maud’s legacy that she, Hal, had been handed on a plate. It was that there was something about her that spoke directly to Hal. Perhaps it was her fierce determination, her refusal to be quashed, her desire to break fre
e. Perhaps it was her wry humor, or her generosity. For Maud’s love and concern for her cousin ran like a thread of gold in the dark throughout the diary, and even across the gap of twenty years, Hal found herself smiling at her remarks. What was it she had said about the tarot cards? Load of wafty BS, that was it. It was so close to what Hal sometimes found herself thinking when she met the more earnest practitioners that she had almost laughed aloud when she read it.

  But what had happened to her? To Maud—to the real Margarida? Where was she now? And why did no one talk about her? Was she dead? Or had she made good her vow to escape?

  Perhaps she had disappeared abroad, changed her name, made a new life for herself. Hal hoped so. For Maud’s own sake, but also because she knew the truth of what had happened in those torn-out pages. She knew the truth about Hal’s mother, and her father.

  Abel, Ezra, Harding, Mr. Treswick—thanks to Hal, they all believed that Maud had died in a car crash, three hot summers ago. Only Hal knew the truth—that it was not Maud who had died, but Maggie, her cousin.

  It was possible, even probable, that Maud was still alive, still out there, still holding on to the truth of what had happened to her cousin, and the secret of Hal’s own identity.

  But to find her, Hal was going to have to go back. Back to Trepassen, where she could start again, pick up the threads of Maud’s life from the beginning. And there was only one way that Hal could think of doing that.

  CHAPTER 31

  * * *

  The next day was Sunday. It was eight when Hal dragged her duvet to the living room and curled up on the sofa with a cup of coffee in one hand, and a pile of letters in her lap.

  On top of them was Harding’s business card.

  She waited until nine thirty before she dialed the number, but it went through to voice mail, and she could not stop a small spurt of relief when she heard the smooth female voice of the automated message.

  “This is the voice mailbox of—”

  And then in Harding’s own voice, slightly pompous and half a tone deeper than his natural register: “Harding Westaway.”

  “Please leave a message after the tone,” continued the woman, and there was a bleep.

  Hal coughed.

  “Um . . . Uncle Harding, it—it’s Hal. Harriet. I am so sorry for running out yesterday, but the fact is—”

  She swallowed again. She had spent the time since getting up trying to decide what to say, and in the end she had decided there was only one thing she could say, only one thing that made sense of her actions. The truth.

  “The fact is, I—I’ve been pretty freaked out by all of this. Whatever I was expecting when I came down to Cornwall, it wasn’t what Mr. Treswick read out, and I’ve found it very hard to come to terms with my grandmother’s will. On Friday night I couldn’t sleep, and I’m afraid I—I just—”

  Beeep. And the message cut out, indicating that she had taken too long to explain herself.

  “To send the message, press one. To rerecord the message, press two,” said the female voice.

  Hal swore quietly, pressed one, and then hung up and redialed. This time it went through to voice mail almost immediately.

  “Sorry, I took too long and the message cut out. Look, the long and the short of it is, I’m very sorry I left without talking to you first, but I’ve had some time to think and—and I’d like to come back. Not just because I appreciate you probably need me present for the interview with Mr. Treswick, but also—well—I have a lot of questions about my mother and about why my grandmother chose to do this and—well, that’s it, really. I hope you’ll forgive me. Please call me back on this number and let me know. Bye. And sorry again.”

  When she put down the phone, she felt her stomach turn with a feeling halfway between nervousness and sickness. Was she mad—to go back?

  Perhaps. But she could not stay here—not with Mr. Smith’s men waiting for her, and not without knowing the truth of her own past. If she burned these bridges now, then she might never be able to find out what had happened at Trepassen. Who her father really was.

  Why had her mother lied about her father’s identity?

  Last night she had been too busy searching in the diary for answers—answers she had not found. But now the question was beginning to press upon her like a guilty secret, demanding her attention. For some reason, her mother had chosen not just to keep Hal in the dark about the identity of her own father, but to go further: to spin a whole tale of falsehoods. The Spanish student—the one-night stand. None of it had existed. But why? Why go to such lengths to keep Hal in the dark about something she had every right to know?

  Before she could unpack the conundrum any further, her phone buzzed against her leg, the shrill sound of the ringer following with a millisecond delay. She looked at the screen, and her stomach flipped. Harding.

  “He-hello?”

  “Harriet!” Harding’s voice was full of a kind of hectoring relief. “I’ve just listened to your messages. Young lady, you gave everyone here a severe fright.”

  “I know,” Hal said. “I’m sorry.” She was sorry, genuinely sorry. “I just—it’s like I said in my message, I was overwhelmed by it all. It’s hard to go from having no one and being answerable to no one to—well.”

  “You could at least have left a note,” Harding said. “Mitzi got the shock of her life when she went up to wake you and found your bed empty and your belongings gone. We had no idea what had happened.”

  “I saw Mrs. Warren as I was leaving. Didn’t she tell you?” The memory of that strange, disjointed encounter was dreamlike. Had it really happened? Had Mrs. Warren really said the things Hal remembered? Good riddance to you, and your trash mother before you. It seemed impossible.

  There was a disconcerted silence.

  “Mrs. Warren, you say?” Harding said at last. “No. No, she said nothing. How very odd.”

  “Oh.” Hal felt wrong-footed. She had assumed Mrs. Warren would have got her side of the story in first—Hal creeping out like a thief in the night, probably with the family silver under her arm. “I just assumed . . . well, I should have phoned earlier. I’m sorry, Uncle Harding.”

  Uncle Harding. It was strange how the words slipped out so automatically. A few days ago they had been so hard to say—she had practically had to force the title uncle out of her mouth. Now it was becoming habit. She was beginning to believe her own lies.

  “Well, we will say no more about it, my dear,” Harding said, a little pompously. “But for goodness’ sake, don’t run away in the middle of the night again. We’d only just found you after all these years and—well—” He stopped and gave a kind of harrumphing cough, covering up the emotion that Hal sensed lurking beneath the matter-of-fact façade. “I don’t think your aunt, for one, could stand the strain. She was beside herself yesterday, with no idea where you were and no means of contacting you. Now—did you say you were coming back?”

  “Yes,” Hal said. She swallowed. With her free hand she picked up the topmost letter from the pile in her lap, folding it back into the creases of the envelope it had lain in for so many years. “Yes, I am.”

  CHAPTER 32

  * * *

  Hal had not considered how she would pay for the ticket back to Penzance until she got to the ticket office at Brighton station, and her card was refused. As she dragged her case away from the counter, her face scarlet with embarrassment, she ran through her options in her head, and could see only one—to try the app again, and hope that the website would process the ticket without checking in with her bank. It seemed a slim hope, but she had no others.

  In a quiet corner beside the coffee stand she pulled out her phone, and was about to open up the app, when she saw an unread text message from Harding.

  Dear Harriet, it read, a little stiffly, after consultation with Mr Treswick, we would like to advance you your fare back to Trepassen, as the travel is necessary to sort out estate business. I enclose a code for a prepaid ticket that should function at any of t
he machines at Brighton. Please call me if there are any problems. Uncle Harding. PS Abel will meet you at Penzance.

  As Hal closed down the message she had the strangest feeling—a mixture of warmth and suffocation. It felt as though a snug scarf were being wrapped around her stiff and unwilling body, but just a little too tightly.

  Remember who you are, she thought, knowing she should have been typing an effusive thank-you text. Remember that meek, grateful little mouse of a niece.

  But as the reality of her own past began to clash with the fiction she had created, it was becoming harder and harder to maintain that role. Harder and harder not to slip up. Was she crazy to go back?

  As the train sped west, the sky darkening all the time, Hal knew she should have been reading, researching, googling names, preparing to plunge herself back into her part. There was so much she needed to know. Had Maud got to Oxford? What had happened to her after that?

  But somehow she could not find the will. She let her head rest against the scratched glass of the window, and stared out at the countryside flashing past. It was cold, and getting colder as they left London and passed into the countryside, the bare trees rimed with frost, the grass white, and puddles black with ice. On any other day Hal would have found it beautiful, but today all she could think about was everything she had left behind and that, perhaps, she would never see again—the flat where she had grown up, all of her past. She was moving forwards now, with every mile the train covered, forwards into an unknown future, her only belongings the case of clothes and papers at her side.

  But she was also going back, into her own past—and of all the unanswered questions that jostled at the back of her mind, there was one in particular that Hal kept returning to, poking and prodding with increasing unease, like a tongue returning again and again to a sore tooth.

  Why had her mother lied?

  The diary, everything in it, that was clear enough. Maggie could not tell her aunt the identity of her baby’s father, and risk never seeing him again.