The Moon Always Rising

by Alice C. Early

  “It took two above-average hurricanes and one doozy to create this mess.” Tony hefted aside a section of palm crown that was wedged between the Jeep and boat trailer. “Even you won’t set it right in a day.”

  While Lauretta and Tony scrutinized the remains of the pergola, Els hung back, looking for signs of the monkeys and wondering how much of Lauretta’s help she really wanted. “We’ll never shift that pile,” she said. “Tony, give me that tire iron.” She climbed to the gallery and started to pry the plywood off the front door. A few minutes in, Tony grabbed the tool from her and finished the job. When they opened the door, light spilled into the lounge, making the room appear larger.

  Lauretta examined the leather chair. “You’ll be replacing this old thing.”

  “It stays,” Els said. “We’ll slipcover much of the rest.”

  Lauretta looked at her and made a note on the pad. The breeze from the open door sent the fire ashes swirling. “What the hell?” Lauretta said. “Was he fixin’ to burn the place down?”

  Els scooped the stack of photographs off the refectory table and tucked them into her tote.

  “What stinks in here?” Lauretta said. “Promise me we won’t discover a body.”

  “Maybe a dead primate or two,” Els said. “No Jack, if that’s what you’re worried about.” She headed up the stairs with Lauretta close behind.

  She opened the study shutters and looked out at the sea. “Just exactly how do you propose to help?”

  “I’m a wizard with lists,” Lauretta said. “I get a real sense of accomplishment from checking things off.” She pronounced it “accomplesh-mint.”

  Els leaned out the window. Hidden from view by the gallery roof, Tony grunted and cursed below.

  “You’re gonna need every trade to make this place fit to live in,” Lauretta said. “Even if you was here all the time, you wouldn’t want to go chasing them. Hell, I’ve dragged workmen out of bed or a bar, if that’s the only way to make deadline.”

  “How do you charge?”

  “By the hour,” Lauretta said. She looked at Els. “Fifty bucks.”

  A piece of plywood sailed over the railing and crashed into the court.

  “Of course, there’s the customary markup on decorating services,” Lauretta said. “Like if you was to have new curtains made or that window seat recovered. I got me the finest seamstress on the island.”

  For once, Els was disinclined to bargain, especially as she had no idea what going rates on Nevis might be. “I’ll expect regular reports and receipts for everything,” she said.

  Lauretta smiled a pixie smile. “When we’re all done, you’ll put this place on the historical society house tour.”

  “Don’t wager on that,” Els said, recoiling at the thought of strangers ogling her home and commenting on her taste, Jack’s taste. Already she felt protective of his possessions, wanted to understand their allure and purpose. She looked at the shelves stuffed with books and files. “And don’t touch this room,” she said. “I’ll sort it when I can get back.” She gathered up the papers on the floor, put them into the filing cabinet, and swept the items she’d removed during the hurricane back into the desk drawer.

  Lauretta took in the bulletin board. “I hear he was quite the ladies’ man.” She walked into the bedroom and gestured toward the mattress and sheets. “Exhibit A. We might need to burn those.”

  “Just get me something I can sleep on without contracting a disease,” Els said.

  Lauretta opened the cupboard and ran her hand over the stack of dress shirts, yellowed on the folds. “I can give these to the church jumble sale,” she said. “Long as I don’t say whose they were.”

  “Leave them.”

  “What do you want with a dead man’s clothes?”

  “I can’t explain,” Els said. She wished she’d kept something of Mallo’s, a favorite shirt that held his scent.

  Lauretta nudged the basket chair. “My granny had one on her front porch.” She picked up its stained seat cushion by the corner and dropped it onto the floor. The bottom of the chair was woven with a heart-shaped hole in the center.

  “I doubt your granny’s was a Japanese love basket,” Els said. “Seems our Jack was a ladies’ man, indeed.”

  Lauretta pulled off a faded gift tag that was tied to the edge of the hole with pink satin ribbon and read, “‘Save this for me alone and let your imagination run. Love always, Amelia.’ Granny’d be blushing to her roots.” Lauretta snuggled into the chair and let it swing. “I gather you have experience with one of these.”

  Els imagined the pleasure Jack might have given his women and felt a bolt of desire for the first time since Mallo’s death, as if the walls were exuding pheromones that she was no longer too numb to sense. She took Lauretta’s hand and pulled her up. “You and Tony can experiment with that some other time,” she said. “Here’s the main job.” She led Lauretta to the bathroom. “Hold your nose and be prepared to run,” she said, and flung open the door.

  “Sweet Baby Jesus,” Lauretta whispered, and covered her nose and mouth.

  Flies spiraled off the mounds of feces and rotting fruit. The stench made Els’s eyes water. Rain had created a pool of dung slurry against the north wall and buckled the floor. The hole in the roof framed cloudless sky.

  “I haven’t seen anything this bad since goats broke into the Winchesters’ villa over by Zetlands,” Lauretta said. “One of them chewed the TV wire and electrocuted hisself.” She fled, her trainers squeaking on the stairs.

  On a shelf next to the lavatory mirror a queen conch shell bristled with toothbrushes beside several toppled medicine vials, each containing a few pills. Els didn’t recognize the drugs. She dropped the vials into her tote. Shaving soap, like a farrier’s paring from a horse’s hoof, rattled in the bottom of a coffee mug. The brush was an antique Rooney with a bone handle, identical to one her father had used.

  She poked at the mess in the tub enough to discover that the pages were handwritten letters. “Misguided S,” one began; another, “Cursed S.” The ink had run on some, and fire had consumed parts of others.

  She tipped the mouse carcass into the tub and gathered up the readable pages. She closed the door securely behind her, went to the study, and put the mug and brush on the desk and the prescription vials in the top drawer. Inside was a sheet of letter paper dated September 21, 1998, with a one-line scrawl: “I have subjected myself to the whip of my own remorse.”

  Imagining the future treasure hunt the room promised, she put the letters in the filing cabinet, closed the windows, and pulled the door shut.

  Els sat with Tony and Lauretta in the shade of the mango tree and ticked off the essential projects while Lauretta took notes in an oversized, round hand. Restore the current and phone service, hook up government water, repair the roof and water damage, install window and door screens, acquire a new mattress, clear away the fire pit, replace the fridge, rebuild the pergola, haul away the sodden contents of the chattel house and replace its roof, repair the cistern, clear the fallen palms and tidy the garden, get the Jeep running or find a decent used car.

  She gave Lauretta the phone number to her London flat and said, “I’ll call you with a fax number so you can send me that list. Remember, leave everything of Jack’s precisely as it is.”

  “Locals won’t go in there with Jack’s belongings all around,” Tony said.

  “Then you’ll find workers who aren’t superstitious, won’t you?” Els said. “How long and how much?”

  Tony took the yellow pad and scanned the list. “You did your famous calculations,” he said. “Double the cost and triple the time and you might be close. Lauretta will keep both in check if anyone can.”

  “When’ll you be back?” Lauretta asked.

  “I haven’t planned that far ahead.”

  “You’re some contradiction.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “So definite about some things,” Lauretta said, “and kinda drifty about othe
rs.”

  Els looked toward the sea. All her life she’d been obsessive, driven, competitive—anything but drifty—but now she felt unmoored, held fast only by Cairnoch and her father, and even he was slipping away into a mental fog different from her own but equally debilitating. She stood up and paced the patch of bare earth under the mango tree. “I want real estimates,” she said. “And a finished job as quickly as possible.”

  “Did you happen to notice the destruction from here to Charlestown?” Tony said. “Competent construction people will be in short supply.”

  “That’s why I have you, isn’t it?” Els said.

  CHAPTER 14

  It was Monday, but Els’s trip to Nevis had erased her mental calendar, its relentless procession of meetings and deadlines. Hugging herself against London’s pervasive November chill, she stepped into her flat, let furnished and offering the charm of a mid-range hotel suite. She would have felt disoriented without her yellow suede chair and her art. Her collection of splashy, challenging works—bought at auction on instinct and impulse—always welcomed her.

  She skipped through phone messages from colleagues and the bank’s human resources department. The last was from Ambrose Timmons, left that morning, requesting she ring back immediately and giving his home number. It was already half eleven. She flopped onto her bed and thought about phoning in the morning, but there was an unusual urgency in his tone.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked.

  “Incommunicado in the Caribbean,” she said. “Hurricane knocked out all the lines.” She waited. Timmons always needed a moment to phrase precisely whatever he wanted to say.

  “The housekeeper found Sir Harald dead on his study floor this morning,” he said. “He might have been there all the weekend. His heart, presumably.”

  She swung her feet to the floor, her fingers locked around the receiver, and rocked on the edge of the bed. Her father’s birthday letter, which had arrived just before she left for Nevis, was still on her bedside table, his writing gone a bit spidery, his affection camouflaged by details of the estate operations, the last roses.

  “Miss Eleanor?” Timmons said. “My condolences. A lion of a man.”

  “That he . . . was,” she said. Referring to her father in the past tense took concentration.

  She went to her dresser and picked up a snapshot of Harald, taken at least ten years before. He was in the hills, leaning against the Rover and smiling into the evening sun of midsummer that burnished his auburn hair. She felt as if her bones were falling into the open spaces in her body—timbers in a collapsing mine—but in silence, except for the faint crackle on the line.

  “I’ve taken care of the preliminaries,” Timmons said. “The chairman and others await your decision on the service, as they all hope to attend.”

  “Tell them Saturday, midday, so they can make it a day trip,” she heard herself say. “I’ll go up first thing tomorrow and ring you from there.”

  When she dumped everything from her case onto the bed, the cheeriness of the bright summer frocks mocked her. An icy fury like that following Mallo’s murder was pushing out any remaining Nevis glow of well-being. Her father had brought this upon himself. He’d been scheduled for quadruple bypass surgery, but after the cancer finally claimed Burtie the previous February, he’d canceled the operation and begun to decline in earnest. That raw sense of abandonment—first her mother’s, then Mallo’s and Burtie’s, now her father’s—gave way to rage crowding in. Harald had chosen to follow Burtie into oblivion instead of staying on earth, with her, and he’d made his decision months ago when Burtie was slipping away.

  She’d been standing in her New York apartment kitchen dripping from her morning run when her father rang. “Doc’s put her on the morphine,” he said. “She was clear for a bit this morning and asked for you.”

  When she’d arrived at Cairnoch, Harald was nowhere to be found. Mary Partridge told her he spent much of his time lately driving the lands in the Rover.

  She climbed onto the bed and rested her head on Burtie’s once ample bosom, now shrunken and smelling of decay instead of violet water. Burtie’s breathing was intermittent, and Els didn’t immediately register the moment it stopped altogether. She covered Burtie’s hand to hold onto her soul a moment longer.

  They’d often been at loggerheads, two stubborn females, one trying to play a mother’s role, the other resenting her for it. Burtie had grown bold in her criticism of Mum, and Els had angrily come to her defense, until they ceased speaking of her at all. It was only after Mallo’s death that Els fully admitted the depth of affection she and Burtie shared.

  On her bedside table, Burtie kept the triangle-folded Saltire that had draped Mallo’s coffin and a photo of him at twenty-one, just out of university. Els took both.

  When Harald bid her goodbye after Burtie’s funeral, the last thing he said was, “It’s time you got that posting to London.”

  Els swept her vacation clothing onto the floor, stuffed black cashmere and tweed into her case, and curled up on her bed. On her dresser was a miniature oil portrait of Mallo at about fourteen, her first clumsy attempt at a human face, which caught his lopsided smile and bright cheeks, and the cowlick that made his rusty hair poke out over his right ear, but not the intensity of his blue eyes. The whirling of her mind battling the exhaustion of her body, she stared at the painting and wished for the numbness she’d need to get through what was to come.

  part four

  CHAPTER 15

  Scotland

  November 22, 1999

  From inside the revolving door at the Aberdeen airport, she could see Tommy McLaren already climbing out of the Rover and thought how he’d been drafted once again for a sensitive job. She dragged her bag outside.

  “Welcome home, Miss Els,” he said. “Ma and Pa and all the brothers send their condolences.”

  “Tommy,” she said. “Yir a sicht fir sair een.”

  “And ye, always,” he said, and held the door for her, then stowed her case in the boot and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “I’m surprised ye’re not at school,” she said. “

  I’m only home the weekend. Got a major exam Tuesday, so I can’t dally.” He started the engine. “Pity Mr. Harald won’t see me graduate, after all he did to encourage me studies. Of course, ye know he meant me to manage yer new livestock scheme.”

  It had been Els’s idea to breed heritage pigs and to put Tommy in charge of the program. “We’ll go right ahead with that,” she said. “Chefs will pay a pretty penny for them.”

  He sat taller. When mist filmed the windscreen, he turned on the wipers. They drove through stands of Douglas fir and Scots pines that made the night all the darker. The mist turned to drizzle as they climbed.

  “You’re looking a mite fagged, if you don’t mind me saying so,” Tommy said.

  “I am that,” she said. Since the closing, she’d slept only a few hours in every twenty-four. A hare ran a zigzag course in front of the car before scrambling up the bank and into the heather. She closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of the Rover: faintly doggy, with an undertone of gun oil.

  She snapped awake when they started into the bowl that sheltered Cairnoch House. Its tall windows were ablaze, but instead of the comfort of arriving home, she felt only dread as they crossed the stone bridge over the lake, passed the ruin of the original tower, and entered the empty car court. She took shelter under the portico while Tommy brought her luggage and opened the massive door.

  The Great Hall was so silent she could hear the case clock ticking in the sitting room beyond. Neither Burtie nor Harald would have approved of leaving all the chandeliers lit. The suit of armor nicknamed Auld George was missing from the corner where it had stood for generations. The center table, which held a towering flower arrangement, had been pushed against the wall. The scent of lilies filled the room.

  “Is anyone here?” she called.

  Mary Partridge, who’d been helping out since Burtie b
ecame too weak to run the household and was now officially the housekeeper, hurried from the dining room, her clogs clacking on the stone floor. “Fàilte, Miss Eleanor,” she said, and embraced Els, then stood away and clasped her roughened hands together. “Pity the night’s so dreich. I’ll warm up a bite for you.”

  “I’d love a bath first,” Els said. “It must have given you a fright, Mary, finding him that way.”

  “And him cold as that fire dog, and as rigid too,” Mary said. She stood with her arms crossed and her fists buried in the sleeves of her jumper.

  “Ye’ve barely packed more ’n a hankie,” Tommy said, lifting Els’s bag onto his shoulder and taking the stairs two at a time.

  “Naw but a wee black frock and city shoes,” Els said. “

  If only I’d insisted on staying through supper on Friday,” Mary said. “Even if I couldn’a saved him, at least he wouldn’a been all alone.” She drew a sharp breath and let it out. “We’ll no fin the brither o him in monie a lang day.”

  “Sure, and they broke the mold after him,” Els said. She squeezed Mary’s shoulders. Only about five years older than Els, Mary had been an extra in the kitchen, a spare girl at parties, for as long as Els could remember. Now, caved in by worry and loss, she looked old enough to be Els’s mother.

  The third step creaked, as it always had, and Els stopped on the landing to survey the Great Hall, the paneled walls lined with portraits of her forebears, laird after laird through two centuries. The only female subject among them was her grandmother, who’d commissioned her own portrait and posed resplendent in her tartan, an heirloom ring on her finger. Hanging next to “The Beatrice,” as the family called the portrait, was a life-sized depiction of Harald with Ajax, his favorite Brittany spaniel, a wide black ribbon tied across the frame. The painter had captured perfectly Harald’s chest-out, shoulders-back stance.