DARLING SAT BESIDE MISS SCOTT’S bed, waiting. When he’d first been shown in, Miss Scott had looked up eagerly. Dr. Edison had said, rather loudly, he thought, that here was Inspector Darling from the police. But moments later the patient had sunk into this state of lethargy. Miss Scott was looking down at the pale green coverlet and folding and unfolding it between her fingers.
“Miss Scott?” he said.
She shook her head. It was hard to tell if it was to clear her thoughts, or an expression of some decision not to talk after all.
“You asked for someone from the police to come and talk to you. How can I help?”
“Where is the other one?” she said, finally, her voice weak.
“The other which?”
“The dark one. I like him. He’s kind.” She finally looked at him but only sidelong, and only for a moment.
“Constable Terrell. Would you feel more comfortable speaking with him?” Darling’s heart sank. Miss Scott had so far shown a very uneven ability to remember things, and he was afraid he would lose whatever advantage he had if he did not find out quickly what had prompted her to ask to speak to the police.
“I can probably get him here in fifteen minutes. Would that be soon enough? I know you seemed very anxious to talk to someone right away.” He was aching to ask her about where her car was, but he was afraid she might shut down.
Miss Scott lifted her hand, either acquiescing or dismissing him, Darling could not tell which, and closed her eyes. Quelling a muttered “Blast!” he went back out to the nurse’s desk.
“Could I use your telephone?”
“Yes, of course. This one here will reach the exchange and you can call outside the hospital.”
Tapping his fingers on the desk impatiently as his call was put through to the station, Darling looked toward the room where Miss Scott lay, burdened, he hoped, with something that might be of use in solving the question of who hit her. Finally, O’Brien came on.
“Nelson Police Station.”
“Put that paper down and get Terrell on the line, and quickly.”
“Certainly, sir. I mean, I would, but he’s gone next door to the café to get a sandwich to bring back to his desk,” O’Brien said. Darling closed his eyes and shook his head. If O’Brien had seen this show of impatience, he would have responded by becoming more stolidly and reproachfully respectful. “Then kindly go and get him. Tell him he is to drop everything and come to the hospital to speak to Miss Scott instanter. He can eat sandwiches on his own time.”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. But the phones—”
“O’Brien.” There was enough warning sounded in this one word.
“Righty-ho, I’m on my way.”
When Darling returned to Miss Scott’s room, she appeared to have drifted off to sleep. Wishing he had a newspaper, he settled down to keep watch over her until Terrell showed up. Looking impatiently at his watch, he calculated the time it would take for O’Brien to get on his coat, stagger into the street to the café, and converse with Terrell. Possibly the sandwich was just on the point of being prepared and needed only wrapping. They would wait. He shook his head to shake himself away from this pointless impatience and turned instead to the matter of the hit and run.
The discovery of the car opened up possibilities. Would the owner prove to be the driver? What, he wondered, was this powerful impetus to see justice done in cases like this? After all, it was likely an accident, and doubtless the person who did it must suffer at the thought that he had hit someone on the road. Knowing that would not bring Mr. Gaskell back. He batted away the suddenly intrusive thought that the world wouldn’t want him back in any case, with his mistreatment of his child and his poisonous notes, and who knows in what other ways he had been a repellent presence among those who knew him.
Darling shifted in the chair and sat back, crossing his legs. But order and justice were the point. Yes, it might have been an accident, but it was against the law not to stop and render assistance. This alone made the effort of finding the culprit of value. Doubtless he, or she, would get a negligible sentence, but it would send a message: There is order in society. There is right and there is wrong. But what if in the whirling snow conditions the driver had not even been aware that he had hit a person? What if he thought he had hit an animal? He himself had hit a coyote one summer when it had bolted out from under a bush right into his car. He hadn’t stopped because he had been responding to a frantic call from a woman who had found her husband dead.
He had just concluded again that Gaskell’s death might remain unsolved, and that the major focus should be on solving the assault on Miss Scott, when he heard Dr. Edison’s voice in the hall outside.
“Constable Terrell, good afternoon. Your boss is in there waiting.”
Darling went out to join them. He would have to bring Terrell up to date. “Constable. Thank you for making good time. Sorry about your sandwich. There will be others. In the meantime, you seem to have sprinkled fairy dust in Miss Scott’s eyes. She won’t talk to me. Only wants you. According to Dr. Edison here, she was urgently asking to speak to the police. I’m assuming that it’s because she remembered something, so if you could step along smartly and find out what it is, I’ll give you a lift back and we can get on with getting this sorted before Christmas. Oh, and see if you can get her to tell you where her car is.”
Terrell, who had removed his hat and was holding it in both his hands, nodded and turned to go in to see Miss Scott. Darling and Dr. Edison watched him and then she said, “He’s a very nice young man. Where did you find him?”
“Yes, I suppose he is. We had a vacancy and he applied. Came highly recommended by his department in Nova Scotia. Good war record.”
“I wonder if he ever feels a bit like a fish out of water here,” she said. She smiled. “I know I do at times. It was all very well in the army. People soon stopped thinking of me as a woman, and I became someone who patched people up, and directed others to patch people up. In a small town like this I am certainly an oddity. But at least when I get out of my lab coat I look like any other woman. His colour makes him a beacon wherever he goes.”
Darling nodded toward the door of the hospital room. Miss Scott was talking earnestly to Terrell, who was leaning in to listen and nodding encouragingly. “So, apparently, does his charm,” he said.
Dr. Edison smiled. “True,” she said.
“HE WASN’T THAT scary,” Rafe said, as Lane closed the book on Dickens’s Christmas ghosts.
“That’s interesting, Rafe. Why is that, do you think?”
Rafe looked up for a moment to think about this. Lane could see Gabriella’s hand waving at the back.
“Because, it’s what you said. Scrooge didn’t really go anywhere, and he woke up in his bed, safe and sound.”
“Good point. What about you, Gabriella? What do you think?”
“I think he was kind of scary, but what made it not seem scary after all is that he woke up and it was Christmas Day, and he was happy. He gave money to the poor people and gave away a big turkey to Tiny Tim and then went to his nephew for a nice party, and so he forgot about being afraid.”
“It sounds like what you are saying is that when something bad has happened, having good things happen afterward can help you maybe feel a little better?”
Gabriella glanced at Samuel, who had his arm stretched out across his desk and was resting his head on it. “Yes. I think that’s true.”
Lane looked around at the children. “What does everyone else think about this?” The children nodded solemnly.
Samuel had sat up, and now put his hand up. “Yes, Samuel. What do you think?” Lane could feel herself almost holding her breath. She had not expected him to want to speak.
“I think the ghosts are something inside you.”
“That is a very important observation, Samuel. Do you think that makes them more, or less, scary?”
“I think it makes a person sad.” She thought he had finished, but in a moment he continued. “But this story makes them sort of come out of you.”
When Lane had set them to writing a paragraph to express all of their ideas about the story, she sat at the desk quite filled with wonder. Here was the Greek concept of catharsis right from the mouth of a child. But Samuel’s words also reminded her that sorrow and grieving were processes that had to be endured, and even though he was in a safe and loving family, he would still need to go through them. Was it different for children? Perhaps they adapted more quickly than adults, responded more quickly to love and warmth and food. She earnestly hoped it were so.
At noon, all the children were outside, but again Samuel stayed back. Lane, with her coat and boots on, knelt beside his desk. “You don’t want to go outside?”
Samuel shook his head. “Where is the other lady, Miss Keeling? She was nice.”
Of course! The children had been told nothing, really, about the disappearance of their new teacher. “She’s had to go off . . . to see someone.” Lane desperately hoped this evasion was true.
“She came to my house that day, before my father didn’t come back.”
A snowball struck very near the window. Lane winced. Well, too bad. If someone broke a window they’d have to live with the cold as a consequence. “Did she?”
“She was mad. She said he was neg . . . neg . . . I can’t remember the word.”
“Neglecting?”
“Yes. She said I didn’t have enough food and she said she thought he had hit me. They had a big fight.”
“Oh, dear. That must have been hard for you to listen to.”
Samuel nodded. “He pushed her and said he’d hit her if she didn’t go, and then she said she would make sure he didn’t hurt me anymore.”
ANGELA DROPPED THE post on the dining room table and hesitated over taking off her jacket and settling down to read the mail. A light snowfall was beginning again, and as late as it was getting in the afternoon, her curiosity about the people at the Anscomb house won over her desire to hang Christmas cards. Going to the kitchen door, she called the dogs and slipped back into the boots she had parked on the porch.
The dogs gathered around her wagging their tails and Lassie offered a bark of encouragement as they waited to see where they were bound. She set off toward the barn and then onto the path that issued onto the road about three hundred yards farther up the path. She could see, in spite of the snow that fell in the night, that a vehicle had been along the road. They must be there still. She wondered if she should have brought along some of the ginger snaps she’d made the day before as a welcome present, and then worried that showing up with two rambunctious collies in tow might not be the most advantageous way to greet a newcomer. But, in for a penny.
She strode purposefully up the hill, the dogs running in and out of the bush along the side of the road. She saw the car even before she heard it and just had time to throw herself onto the snow-covered bushes on the side of the road to avoid being hit. Her heart beating frantically, she swore and sat up in time to see the tail end of a large, black, late-model car barrelling down the road at full speed. Her next thought was for the dogs, but they both were running down the middle of the road, barking at the disappearing car.
She struggled up, brushing snow off her trousers and aware of a sharp pain in her hip. She must have landed straight on a large rock, she thought angrily, and gingerly felt for any other pain.
“Who the hell was that?” she said out loud to the dogs, who had given up any thought of pursuit and were now watching their mistress, tails wagging expectantly. Was it the car Mabel had seen?
“Yes, you’re a bloody big help!” she said to the dogs. She thought about going home and putting on a pot of coffee, but instead determinedly continued her walk to the house.
Standing before it, Angela was taken aback by how much still had to be done. There were clearly plans for a new wider porch, but the old one had been wrecked and only the skeletal supports for the new one were in evidence. Larger windows were stacked against the house, but no move had been made to replace the ones that were there. She looked down the hill at what the new windows would show and saw that the view would simply be what it already was: a view down the road, a curtain of evergreens, and only the tops of the mountains on the other side of the obscured lake. No water view at all. Angela climbed the stairs and rapped on the door, but already knew that no one was there. There was an eerie stillness to the place that, in spite of the smell of the new wood studs and gathered building materials, almost intensified that sense of abandonment and desolation the house had always had. The person in that car must have spent a cold night, unless whoever it was slept in the car just to get a nap in before taking off again in the morning, she thought.
She put her hands up to the windows and looked inside. The rudiments of furniture occupied the centre of an otherwise empty space: a small hearth rug and an old wingback chair near what was evidently to be a huge stone fireplace, the stones piled on the floor waiting to be put in place. She went around the back of the house to look into the kitchen window to see if there were any interesting new appliances. People with the kind of money to practically rebuild a house would want only the latest gadgets, but aside from the new linoleum and the electric stove that she and Lane had seen before, nothing had yet been touched in the kitchen besides the removal of the old stove.
She turned and looked around the back of the house. Who would want this sad place? she thought. She supposed someone from the city could imagine a picturesque cabin for summer retreats and had bought it sight unseen. Had the new owner come to check on the work and decided it wasn’t worth going on? Someone with a lot of money would want a lake view, surely? The dogs were once again sniffing around the coal chute. No doubt some animal had got in and died ages ago. The doors sat at an angle against the house and opened upward. Looking around nervously, Angela considered pulling up one of the doors just to see what the dogs were making such a fuss about. She knew what she would see. An angled chute into the basement where no doubt some coal had been delivered. Or a dead muskrat. Gingerly she lifted one of the doors and peered into the darkness. The dogs moved forward, sniffing eagerly.
“Hello?” She knew it was ridiculous. There would be no one there. And indeed, there was only silence. Very slowly she became aware of a peculiar smell. The cold had prevented her from sensing it right away. What was it? The strong smell of coal was overlaid with a slight smell of stale food and a scent she could only liken to a train-station toilet.
Obviously, the workmen had left food behind to go stale in the basement along with all the other general mess. She shuddered. She wished now she’d made a note of the name of the construction company on the van. She must remember never to call them for anything. She left the door open and turned to go. The dogs had now bolted off into the trees behind the property. “Come on, you two. Let’s go home.” That’s when she saw what she’d missed. Underneath all the disturbance of the snow around the coal chute caused by herself and the dogs, she saw a pale red streak right along the inside edge of the chute. She lifted the other door this time and saw a clear stain of what most certainly looked like blood on the edge of the frame. The imagined muskrat, hurt and trying to escape? One of the workmen? She nervously went toward where the dogs had disappeared behind the woodshed.
A bank of cloud had moved over the already pale winter sun, emphasizing the unutterable dreariness of the whole place. She turned her mind back to the comforts of a pot of coffee in her snug house and the pile of Christmas cards awaiting her.