“I JUST HAVEN’T THE WILL FOR it,” Lane said. She was in the Armstrongs’ kitchen. “It’s so frightful. What kind of Christmas will that little boy have now? Though I’m sure it would have been no picnic with that father.”
“It is dreadful,” Eleanor said, “but he will have the best Christmas that kind family can make for him.”
“From what I understand, his place with that family is not even a sure thing. They’ve agreed to take him, but the government might decide to carry him off somewhere else, to complete strangers, or even send him to some sort of orphanage. Do they have those here?”
Eleanor drank her tea reflectively. “I suppose they have something on the coast or at some of the bigger towns. But surely no one would want to take a child from a family that wants him?”
A skeptical “Humph” escaped Kenny as he leaned over to pat Alexandra, who lay on her bed at his feet.
“And what if they only agreed to take him on the understanding that he would go back to his father when things had settled? I mean, they may not be prepared to keep him, even if they are allowed to. It is an added burden to a family,” Lane said. “Now that he’s dead, I’m sure there’s a bureaucracy out there that grinds into action when something like this happens. I’m really afraid that what is right is the very thing that will not happen.”
“Let’s keep a positive outlook. You may be surprised. Are they any closer to finding a teacher?” Eleanor gently tried to move the conversation away from the tragedy of Samuel Gaskell’s situation.
“Well, certainly no one tells me anything. I’m assuming I’ll be there one morning, struggling to teach arithmetic, and a teacher will sweep in and take over.” Lane looked at her watch. “He must be on his way back soon. I’d better get going. Poor dear, it must be absolutely the worst part of the job.”
Alexandra leaped up when Lane stood and watched her as she put on her coat. Lane smiled. For all the world, Alexandra’s face seemed to be saying, “I’m here if you need me,” as if she understood that something sad was afoot with the humans.
Lane stooped down and rubbed the top of the dog’s head, and she was rewarded with happy tail wagging. “I really ought to get you a little friend,” she said. As she stood up, Eleanor, who’d been busy at the counter by the sink, thrust a cake tin at her.
“Just a bit of the walnut cake. We can’t eat it all. It’ll be a little something for afters.”
The kindness in Eleanor’s voice filled Lane with gratitude and she went into the darkening afternoon full of the juxtaposition of human kindness and human tragedy, all playing out together on this eternal snowy landscape. The icy air hit her with a refreshing wallop after the almost overwarm air of the cottage kitchen. As she approached the path to her house through the stand of birch, now leafless and white like the snow around them, she could hear the strain of a car changing gears as it tackled the hill. She hurried the last distance to the house and put on the kettle. A whisky toddy would certainly be a start. It was then that she remembered that she had meant to tell Darling about the revolver in the cupboard, and what she was certain it meant. It would be, she feared, a long night.
June 1939
THE TRAIN STATION at Williams Lake was nearly empty. Wendy had no idea when a train would be leaving. The man in the ticket booth looked up when she knocked on the window to get his attention.
“I need a ticket to Vancouver.” She could feel her voice shaking. It must be obvious that she was running away. But the man pulled his watch out and waved it at her.
“No train till morning. You’re a bit early, or a bit late.” He chuckled.
Wendy relaxed a little and pushed money toward him. “How much money does it cost?” She’d taken money from the jar where her aunt kept it in the pantry. She was a thief as well as a runaway, she thought.
“You don’t need that much.” He took a small amount and returned the rest. “I’m about to close up the station. You better go home and come back in the morning. You people don’t travel much. In fact”—here he peered up at her through the grill—“you look a little young. You supposed to be on your own?”
“I’m visiting an aunt.” She was going to add the name of a place, but she didn’t know one besides Vancouver.
“All right. Well, here’s your ticket. Now run along home. Train’ll be here at eight. It’s coming overnight from out east.”
Wendy took the ticket and walked out of the station as if she were going to walk up the road, but instead turned and ducked along the side of the station building, and then found a space at the back of the station facing the tracks. The main platform was built on sturdy scaffolding so that under it there was space just big enough for her to hide in. She sat on her small suitcase, the same one she had packed when she was a child to come here. She had been pulled away from everything she knew to a new life with her aunt and uncle, and now she prepared to wait out the night to begin a new life again. Her long skirt and wool stockings would help to keep her warm overnight.
She had been there no more than an hour when she heard a truck around the front of the station on the road. Her blood froze. She knew that truck. She pushed herself farther under the platform and held her breath. She could hear someone running, and then banging on the door of the station.
“It’s closed. No train until tomorrow. What if she left on this morning’s train?” Her uncle’s voice.
The second voice was the elder’s. He spoke more quietly. She strained to hear. “. . . A ride going east, maybe.”
“When I find her, I will strangle her for the shame she’s brought on my house! I should never have taken her in. You are a saint to want to take her on!”
“I suppose we could call the authorities? Anything could happen to her if she’s gone into the wilderness.”
“Then it would be righteous judgment. I don’t have truck with the police! When I want to do justice, I do it according to the word of the Lord. Tomorrow we will ask if she boarded the train. She’d be like to go back to the city. It’s all she knows.” Wendy heard no more, as her uncle’s voice dropped, or he’d arrived back at the truck.
She heard the doors of the truck slamming. The sound was final, loud in the quiet afternoon. She folded into the tightest ball she could and waited, the sound of the river now her only companion.
VANCOUVER FELT LIKE a wall of noise. It was a world so unlike her old one that she could scarcely remember who she must have been as an eight-year-old. She stood on the platform and tried to recapture what that had felt like. Nothing came. Her childhood was an alien world to her now. Someone jostled her and she turned to look. It was a man, his face hidden under a hat. A woman followed him, hurrying, calling out for him to wait up. The woman sounded peevish. And then they were swallowed by the station door, taking their lives with them.
The Vancouver station was full of people, their coming and going a heart-pounding blur to her. She could not have imagined so many people in one place. And all of them seemed to have purpose, direction. Wendy went and sat on the bench against the station wall, pressing her back to the wall as if it might protect her, and looked at the train that had just dropped her off. She pushed her suitcase so that it was behind her feet, hidden by her long skirt. She had thought only of getting away, but never of what she would do when she got here. She had spent the time on the train alternately sleeping and wondering when they would catch her. She had peered anxiously out at each station the train stopped at, thinking they must know now she hadn’t gone on yesterday’s train, and must have followed in the truck, but each station was only full of strangers who stared at her, then quickly looked away. As the train had travelled farther away from Williams Lake, her immediate fear had begun to dissipate, and instead she had been overwhelmed by an exhausted sleep.
When most of the people had left the station, she went to the ticket booth and leaned in to speak to a man with a dark blue cap who was looking down at some papers.
“Excuse me. Do you know of a rooming house near here? Well, anywhere, really.”
At the sound of her voice he looked up and peered closely at her. “You look a bit young,” he said.
“I’m eighteen,” she lied. “I’ve come to go to secretarial school.” She hoped there was such a thing.
“Just go down that way, along Cardero. You’ll see signs.” He waved his hand toward the door.
She thanked him and turned to go. “Good luck,” she heard him call after her as she pushed open the door onto the street. The skepticism she heard in his voice was drowned by the noise of traffic.
After passing several houses with signs, losing her nerve at each one, indeed, losing her nerve at every moment on the street, startled by every stranger she passed, she stopped in front of a dark gabled house with a tiny, neat garden behind a fence. “Lady Boarders” said the sign.
A tall woman dressed in tweed with an olive-green cardigan over her shoulders answered her knock. Her hair was tightly curled and held in place with a fine net. She looked at Wendy for a long moment before she spoke.
“Yes?”
“I’m looking for a room. I . . . I don’t have very much money, I don’t think.” That was one of the features of Wendy’s life. She had no idea about money. Her uncle went into town to buy supplies, and they had chickens and milk cows and a garden. Wendy had never left the farm.
The tall woman frowned at her, and unconsciously glanced down the street and then back at the young woman in her strange clothes. “Where have you come from?”
Fearful now that she would be in trouble because she was young, or that the woman would think she had run away from home, Wendy said, “I came from near . . .” She hesitated. If she said Williams Lake, she could be traced if her uncle changed his mind and the police were set on her. “Vernon. I’ve come to find work. My family . . . needs the extra money.”
The woman shook her head and opened the door wider. “You’d better come in. You don’t look like you should be out on your own. As it happens, I need some help around here. You can stay in return for some housekeeping. As to you getting a job—” The woman looked her over, shaking her head again. “You’re going to have to dress like a normal person. You can put your bag there for now.”
In the kitchen, the woman filled a kettle at the sink and put it on the stove with a clatter, turning a knob. “I’m Mrs. Franklin. I have four other young ladies here. Three of them are going to school. Can you read and write?”
Her face flushing, Wendy stammered, “Of course.” Did she look like someone who couldn’t read?
“Well, that’s something, anyway. What sort of work were you thinking of?” The water in the kettle was beginning to heat up, making a hum. As Wendy watched it, it triggered something far back in her memory. “We had a stove like that, that you just turn on with a knob,” she said suddenly. “When I was a child. I remember now!”
“My word,” Mrs. Franklin said quietly, pulling a tin of tea out of the cupboard.
“I’m sorry. I was thinking that I could teach school. I like children.” This statement was a surprise to Wendy, but now that it was said, she saw that it must be true.
“You have to do a darn sight more than like children. You have to have training, get a certificate. You have to have a high school education, for starters. You don’t look like you’ve ever seen the inside of a public school.”
“Oh.” Wendy sat back and was silent. Then she remembered the inside of her school. The long hallways, a picture of the King in her classroom. Other children sitting in rows around her. A smell of orange peels. She felt almost overwhelmed with the flood of memories. “I did go to school. Here in Vancouver. I was in grade three. Then I had to go live with my uncle and aunt.”
“A grade-three education. Splendid,” Mrs. Franklin said. “After you have a cup of tea, I’ll show you to your room. You’ll be sharing with Mary McCardle. We’ll have to see about getting you some proper clothes, and I’ll show you your duties.”
It was only then that Wendy looked down at her clothes. The long, loose dress, the apron, the thick wool stockings, her heavy boots. They weren’t like anyone else’s. She had been so fixated on her escape that she hadn’t noticed how different she looked from everyone else. In what other ways was she not like everyone else?
DARLING HAD DECIDED not to call the Benjamins from work, feeling he needed to build up to it, and was on the phone now, from home, to Julia Benjamin. Lane could hear the long silence at the other end of the line when Darling had broken the news about Samuel’s father. Finally she heard the voice, far away, tinny, hesitant, saying something.
“Yes, of course. You are right. I’ll be there first thing in the morning, if you can keep him back.” The woman’s voice again, pitched suddenly higher. “No,” Darling said, “I don’t think we need to worry about that just at the moment. It’s very, very good of you. It will make all the difference to him just now.”
“She’s right, of course,” Darling said as he hung up. “It is not the sort of news you deliver to a child before bedtime. They were worried that this might cause him to be moved somewhere, to a relative. I sincerely hope I’m right that it is not something to worry about just now.” He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know if a nine-year-old child even understands death, really. Anyway, they are keen to keep him there.”
“Thank God for that,” Lane said. She had begun to make supper and moved back toward the kitchen, but instead of taking up the task of slicing carrots again, she sat down, her hands folded in front of her. Did a child understand death? She had been five when her mother died. She still remembered being told of it, her grandmother holding both her hands. She remembered feeling a kind of dread whenever she was near the room where her mother had been sick, and then never seeing her again. Had she thought her mother would come back one day? “He’s nine. I don’t know what a child that age would understand. I was five when my mother died. I can’t remember what I understood, only that there was a kind of darkness.”
“I was sixteen when mine died. I’m not sure I even understood it then. I mean, you know what ‘dead’ means, but you can’t comprehend the massive absence the person leaves behind,” Darling said.
Lane let this sit for a moment, and then took up the knife and moved the carrots into place, then paused. “If there were other relatives, wouldn’t they have come out of the woodwork before now? It sounds as if that poor child has been living an extremely marginal life with that inept brute since the mother went away.”
“Unless they didn’t know about his situation. We’ve instituted a search, of course, but it becomes more urgent now. We can add Samuel’s relations to the list of missing persons we’re trying to track down,” Darling said.
“Speaking of missing persons, I made a discovery today. Two, actually. I believe either Miss Keeling or Miss Scott was afraid of someone. It’s the reason I telephoned you, but of course this dreadful business of Samuel’s father put it right out of my mind. I found a pre-war Webley revolver high up in the kitchen cupboard at the school that I’m pretty sure was put there recently. There was no dust on it, but plenty of dust on the shelf. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I found it, and I wondered who would bring a gun into a school, and why. It seems to me to be an act of desperation. But Samuel, actually, said he’d seen a car several times parked down the road a bit from the school, as if someone was watching. Maybe one of the teachers thought she was being watched. Maybe one of them was being watched. He thought it was the same car that he’d seen outside the teacher’s cottage.”
Darling frowned. “Where is the gun now?”
“Wrapped in my handkerchief and back in the top cupboard. I was hoping we could nip over and pick it up. I don’t want that thing in the school!”
June 1939
WENDY STOOD IN the room she’d been shown to. It was dark because the flowered curtains were closed, and it had a smell she could not quite identify: something pungent, like the remedy her aunt spooned into water for the children when they had tummy upsets. Mrs. Franklin had gone for sheets and a pillow slip for the unmade bed. Wendy opened her bag and took out the small bible, now the only thing she had from her mother, and placed it on the bedside table. She sat on the bed with her hands folded, looking at it. She had often wondered what happened to the teddy bear she’d had. That had been her mother’s too. Something in it was wicked, it was ungodly, her aunt had said. She was ungodly. Her heart was pounding with a sudden upsurge of fear. What had she done? She had run away from home, from a sacred obligation to marry and escape from her mother’s sin. Her sin. If they found her! She felt her breath catch with fear at that final warning about what would happen if she were caught. The silence of the room offered nothing in the way of comment. She put her bag at the foot of the unused bed and turned to look at the room. Whoever the other girl was, she was very neat. Her bed was made, and a three-drawer dresser had a hairbrush and a comb lined up side by side on a little pink cloth. A small jar of Pond’s face cream stood next to them. She longed to open the jar and smell the cream, but she could hear Mrs. Franklin closing a door somewhere outside in the hall.
Next to her own bed was another dresser, and it, like the other one, had a mirror hanging on the wall behind it. Wendy approached this and looked into it. Reflected back at her was a face she scarcely recognized, hair pulled back and hidden under a scarf tied tightly at the nape of her neck.
There were no mirrors in her uncle’s house. It was to prevent sinful vanity. How did she know that? Had she asked once, when she’d first arrived? Her hand went up to her forehead and then down again.
“You see what I mean about your clothes,” Mrs. Franklin said, coming briskly through the door with a pile of bed linen. “You can’t possibly go about looking like that. Now then. Make your bed and settle in. The bathroom is down the hall. We have a bathing schedule for all our young ladies that you will see posted on the wall. You will be bed four.”
Wendy turned guiltily away from the mirror and accepted the linen that Mrs. Franklin put into her hands.
Nodding at the bag Wendy had put on the floor, Mrs. Franklin asked, “Is that full of more of this sort of thing?” She pointed at Wendy’s clothes.
Wendy nodded. “It’s what we have. We make them.” She stopped. It had been in her mind to add “as God intended.”
“Good for you. You can sew. I can put you to the mending. I have a few bits of clothing that my young ladies have left behind. Let’s see if we can get you looking less like a girl off a wagon train. Now, you get settled and come down when you’re ready.” She walked to the window and pulled the curtains open decisively, turned smartly out of the room, and shut the door, leaving Wendy in the heavy silence with her new and unknown self.