THOUGH CHRISTMAS WAS ALMOST TWO weeks away, perhaps it was not too early to get the children involved in some sort of Christmas activity. They could read Christmas stories and make cards to take home. They could sing some carols. That should fill the rest of this week and a good part of the next one, Lane thought. Judging by the calendar one of the teachers had put up, the holiday would start at the end of day on Friday the nineteenth.
Standing in the quiet, almost ringing silence of the cold classroom in the pre-dawn dark, she knew she was grasping at straws. She had prepared some dictation and had found a little book of science facts for the younger children and a book of world history. She would have to look at these and perhaps find out from the children where they’d got to, and which students were on which level. Of course, she wouldn’t be here that long. The problem was what to do now, in the short term. An essay! They could all attempt an essay on what Christmas meant to them. That would certainly be educational.
Hope renewed, she set about lighting the stove. That done, but with her thick wool jacket still on till the room began to warm up, she turned her mind to supplies. There must be art supplies somewhere. Though she had found some foolscap pads, ink, pen nibs and holders, pencils, and the children’s copy books in the main classroom, as well as several copies of books of stories, grammar, science, and arithmetic, she had found no boxes of coloured pencils or coloured chart paper. She had not looked through all the kitchen cupboards, thinking that they would only contain plates and cups, and she had rejected the uppermost cupboard as being too high to be useful. Now she dragged a chair to the counter and climbed on it to reach the upper cupboard. Nothing. As a disappointed afterthought, she pushed her hand into the back, feeling the layer of dust, and struck something hard and metallic. Her hand recoiled. She could feel at once that it was a revolver. She clambered off the chair and went to the classroom to where her handbag sat on the desk and extracted her handkerchief.
Carefully she reached in with the handkerchief and found the handle of the revolver, slid it out of the back of the cupboard, and carefully held it flat in her hand. It immediately struck her that it was not dusty. She wrapped the revolver in the handkerchief and put it on the counter and then reached up again into the back of the cupboard, feeling the space carefully with her hand, but there was nothing else, only the thick layer of dust coating that came away on her fingers, which she brushed off on the back of her jacket.
Lane hurried back into the classroom to look at the clock. The stove was beginning to do its job. She took off her jacket and hung it on the hook beside her desk and then she sat down, her hands flat on the desk in front of her. The children would not be there for a good fifteen minutes still.
One of the teachers had brought a gun into the school, and relatively recently. Why? She could imagine someone deciding that a revolver might make them safer in that cabin, especially when only one person lived there. Had Miss Scott owned the gun, and then, when Miss Keeling had moved in, thought it might be safe enough to be without it? But why move it to the school where any of the older, more curious children might find it? It was an act of absolute folly.
It would have to go back into the cupboard for the day, and Lane would call the station as soon as she got home. With this plan firmly in mind she returned to the kitchen and pulled the edges of the handkerchief away to look more closely. It was a Webley, certainly pre-war vintage. She was tempted to break it to see if it was loaded but decided against it. Darling could do it. They could drive back to the school as soon as he got home and retrieve it. Anxious now about the day’s lessons, and glad she had spent the evening before preparing dictation and spelling work to start off the day, she rewrapped the gun, climbed the chair, and pushed the weapon into the back corner of the cupboard, where she’d found it. And not a moment too soon; she could hear the first car toiling up the road toward the schoolhouse.
She took a few deep breaths and had begun to write the day’s activities on the blackboard when the stomping of snow off boots was followed by the door being opened. She turned. It was Gabriella Benjamin and a slender pale boy she had not seen before. This must be Samuel.
“Good morning, Gabriella. Who do you have with you?” Lane put the chalk down and walked to the back of the class prepared to shake hands.
“Good morning, miss. This is Samuel. He doesn’t like to be called Sam.”
“How do you do, Samuel. I’m Miss Winslow. You’ve been away. I’m very glad to see you.” Lane offered her hand, which the boy took shyly before pulling his hand away. “I think I heard that you like to read. Is that so?” Lane asked, helping him out of his coat. He was alarmingly thin.
He nodded.
“He reads all the time. He’s our best reader. He knows all the words the other students don’t,” Gabriella said with a formal and almost proprietary air.
“That is splendid. Then you will be enormous help to me. I’m quite new, and I need lots of help with the younger children. Where do you normally sit, Samuel?” She had seen with a flutter of dismay that he had the remnants of a black eye.
“He sits over here, next to me, where Randy has been sitting. He can go back to his regular seat. Samuel is staying with me right now. He gets to read all the books we have.” Gabriella was guiding Samuel to his desk.
“That must be fun. What’s your favourite book?” Lane asked, hunching next to his desk.
“I’m reading Robinson Crusoe.”
His voice was clear in a way Lane had not expected. A survivor, she thought. It was in his eyes and his voice and it belied his now fading black eye, scrawny body, and clean but threadbare clothes. She suspected Gabriella’s family had cleaned up what little clothing he’d come to them with.
“One of my favourites,” she said. She rested her hand for just a moment on his arm, and then stood up to greet the other students, who were beginning to tramp up the stairs.
AT NOON, THE students, having finished their lunches, crowded into the kitchen area and noisily stowed their metal lunch boxes. Then the tussle of climbing into outdoor clothes began. Lane leaned on the door jamb, watching them wrestle with scarves and boots, leaning down from time to time to help with the buttoning of a coat. She opened the back door and watched them tumble down the stairs and called out, “I’ll be out in a moment! Stay right where I can see you.”
Closing the door with a sigh of relief at the sudden diminution of the high-pitched shrieking that is the sound of children everywhere, she reached for her own coat and overshoes, and wished, not for the first time that day, that she could have worn trousers, the only reasonable garb on such a piercing, snowy day. She walked back into the classroom to check the stove and was surprised to hear the shuffle of a page turning.
“Samuel! You don’t want to go outside to play with the others?”
“I just want to read my book,” he said. His head lay on his outstretched arm, and he was holding the book at an angle. He sat up, as though he thought he might be in trouble for resting his head on the desk.
Lane approached and sat in the desk next to his. “Still Robinson Crusoe?”
“I’ve almost finished it. I love the part at the end. I’ve read it lots of times before.”
“I know what you mean,” Lane said. “I hate to put a book down when it’s near the end.” She jumped when a snowball slammed the wall. If they are starting with snowballs, they really will want watching, she thought. She was about to get up when he spoke again.
“I thought there would be a new student here.”
“Did you? Why? Do you know of someone who has moved nearby?” Lane asked.
“No, but I saw that car a couple of times. It was the same one that was at Miss Scott’s.” Samuel had turned the book over, and now turned to glance out the window.
“You saw the same car here, at the school?”
Samuel nodded. “I guess so. It was stopped just down where the big tree is. The last time I saw it I was walking home, and I tried to look inside to see if there was any children.”
“But there weren’t any?” Lane was curious now.
“It was hard to see because the windows were shut. It was sort of like a mirror. I could see myself. Then when I saw the car at Miss Scott’s, I figured they were going to talk to her, or Miss Keeling, about their child coming to the school.”
“Well, that’s disappointing, isn’t it, when you expect to meet an interesting new student? When did you see the car at Miss Scott’s?”
“Like I told the inspector policeman, the one with the brown hat who took me into town, it was the day my father went to work, except he didn’t come back. I got to eat pancakes at a place in town with the policeman.”
“That sounds just lovely,” Lane said, smiling. “Did you tell the inspector about seeing that same car here?” Samuel turned his book back over, just as two more snowballs in close succession hit the school.
It’ll be the windows next, Lane thought with alarm, pulling her gloves on.
“He didn’t ask me about that.”
“I’m going to leave you in charge of the classroom, and you can stay and read. I’d better get outside,” Lane said.
Outside, Lane’s presence put a momentary halt to the worst excesses of the snow activity, and then when she didn’t shout at them, they continued playing, but were slightly more subdued. She was relieved to see Philip and Rafe building a snowman with Gabriella. Three fewer children making snowballs. She stood with her hands behind her back, watching with delight the children just being children, illuminated by sunlight and the responding sparkle of the snow, and then she turned to look down the road that approached the school. What was the “big tree”? From where she stood, all the trees looked the same, and they’d all be quite big relative to the size of Samuel, certainly.
But then she remembered the snow-covered winters of her own childhood, and how she wandered for hours outside on her own, especially to the small stand of trees at the top of a hill near her house. She had loved that hill because she could look down at her house, the smoke curling out of its chimneys, the small figure of the gardener outside cutting wood. She pretended it was as miniature as a dollhouse, with tiny living people. She had known, she recalled, each of those trees as if it were a friend. She knew their shape, and the peculiarities in their bark, and which ones had birds in them. Perhaps a grown-up looking at them would just have seen trees, all looking more or less the same. She would ask Samuel after school about the big tree.
DARLING WAS STANDING in the morgue with one Arthur Begley, the supervisor of the small ferry works crew that ran the cable ferry between Nelson and the north shore of the lake. The corpse was exposed from the shoulders up, any expression on the face released by death, devoid of the tension of anger and disappointment that had shaped it in life. Even his unshaven, scruffy chin looked benign in death.
“That’s him, all right, poor fellow. Gaskell. I mean, he wasn’t the most pleasant person to work with, but he did his job. Drinking, no doubt?”
“Thank you, Mr. Begley. You are quite sure? Are you aware of any next of kin?”
Begley shook his head, turning his hat around in both his hands. “I heard a story from one of the other men that his wife had upped stakes. She was quite a bit younger than him. He has a kiddie, I know that. Bit old to be parenting a young kid on his own, if you ask me. I don’t know who looks after him when Gaskell’s at the bar.”
And didn’t think to ask, Darling thought. Samuel’s condition was the consequence of the reluctance of anyone to get into anyone else’s business.
“Do you know if Gaskell had a regular drinking place?”
“I know he’s a regular at the Legion. He saw service in the first show. Now that I think of it, someone told me they’d seem him heading toward the Metro from there on Friday night, though that’s a little fancier. Not his usual, I wouldn’t have said.”
“Was he a good employee? Reliable?”
Begley shrugged. “He came on time, anyway, and did his job. Didn’t take too much sick time. Surly sort of fellow, if it’s not wrong to speak ill.”
“Surly?” asked Darling.
“Didn’t get on with the other men. Didn’t get on with anyone, as near as I could see.” Begley looked again at the covered mound that was the last mortal remains of Gaskell and shook his head a fraction. “Maybe the good Lord will find a place for him.”
“Thank you, Mr. Begley. Sergeant Ames will see you out. He is at the top of the stairs.” Darling turned back to contemplate the corpse. Though he knew already it was futile, he wanted somehow to see something in that face, anything, that would explain how a man could leave a child to fend for himself while he went off drinking in the middle of winter, but all reasons were gone. Only the fatherless child was left.
Gilly had said the victim’s pelvis and lower back had been broken by being struck directly from behind at speed. He had refused to commit to whether it might have been deliberate, though on the whole, because of the violence of the damage, he thought it was possible that it was accidental, that the driver had not seen him until it was too late and had no ability to slow down or swerve away in time, especially with the snow. Other than these injuries he could report that his hands showed the wear and tear of handling the ferry in all weathers, that he had broken his ulna in childhood, and that he had been cut quite badly on the upper part of his wrist, possibly within the last year, which had left a nasty scar. Otherwise, considering the amount of drinking he apparently did, he had been in relatively good health.
It had been difficult to ascertain with the snow that had fallen since the accident if the car in question had been equipped with chains. If it hadn’t been, it wouldn’t be surprising that the driver had lost control on that road.
The next thing would be having to tell Samuel that his father was dead. Darling never relished informing families, but it was worse having to tell a child. He’d only had to do it a few times in his career, but the incomprehension, the sheer inability of children to understand the final magnitude of death, was painful. They could only understand that their mother or father would never come back, and it opened a void of darkness and fear that had little to do with “mourning the loss of a loved one,” as the funeral brochures put it with such saccharine detachment.
He turned to go back upstairs just as the door opened. “Phone call, sir. The boss.”
“Your missus.” Only O’Brien could get away with this and he knew it. Darling’s disapproving expression only encouraged him.
“You sound like someone whose day has just taken a bad turn,” Lane said.
“It has,” Darling said, collapsing onto his chair. “That hit and run has been identified as that poor little boy’s father, Gaskell. I don’t even know how to begin to tell him.”
“Oh, that’s absolutely beastly! He’s such a lovely little boy. He was at school today, with Gabriella. She seems terribly fond of him. Of course, nothing can take away the shock of losing a parent like that, but I think her being in his corner is something.”
“Yes, I expect you’re right.”
“Could you telephone the parents ahead of time to let them know that you’re coming? That way they could be somewhat prepared.” Lane pitied Darling, listening to his silence at the other end of the line. How often were the police obliged to make this visit and give this news? How much worse to have to deliver it to a child who effectively had no other parent! “I don’t know, of course, how he will respond, but he has a kind of wisdom of a very old soul.” But she wondered as soon as she said this if it were true, or just a comforting fantasy. She had, after all, only met him the once. He certainly had something that made him—here she paused in her thoughts—more resilient, perhaps. Still, children were, after all, children, however wise and tough.
“I’d best be about it,” Darling said finally. “I’ll see you when I get home.”
Lane hung up the phone at her end, feeling the weight of sorrow for Samuel compressing her heart. Too late she remembered she was the one who’d called Darling, to tell him about the gun she’d found. She sat down and imagined Darling having to tell the boy this impossible news. What a dreadful part of his job!
For his part, Darling was trying to sort out how he would organize the awful business. He would make the call to the Benjamins before he left and then stop there on the way home, he decided.
He poked his head into Ames’s office. “Why are you still here?”
“Stuff to finish up, sir. Any word on our corpse?”
“The worst, I’m afraid. It’s Gaskell, that little boy’s father. I’m going to telephone the Benjamins first to break the news. Thank God he’s with that family. They seem like pretty decent people.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”
“You won’t have time to be sorry, Ames. I want you to get out to the Legion, Gaskell’s usual drinking place, and see if you can get a bead on who he was with on Friday night. Did he leave with anyone? Did anyone leave right after him? If you get no joy there, try the Metro. Someone saw him heading that way.”
“The Metro, sir? That seems a little high-class for him.”
“That’s why it’s interesting. Would a dishevelled single man like him go alone to the Metro? Or would he go with someone, and if so, whom? Or was he meeting someone there? Or even hoping to meet someone there?”