“I’M NOT SURE ABOUT THE man, you see. I can’t seem to see it.”
Terrell nodded. “Not sure you remember the man? Is that what you wanted to tell us?”
“Yes, that’s why, you see. I’m not sure anymore about a man.” Miss Scott had her hand on Terrell’s coat sleeve. She tilted her head and gave a slight smile.
For his part, Terrell was trying gamely to understand. Miss Scott had felt strongly enough about a change in what she remembered to call the police back, but that change was in itself completely confusing.
“Are you saying that you can’t remember the man, or you can’t remember a man at all?” It could not be possible that there was no man, otherwise how had the house been torn apart? “Do you mean it was a woman?” This would bring them right back to Miss Keeling.
“No, no, no! She wasn’t there! I was surprised, you see. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I felt so unwell!”
Miss Scott became more agitated. “No! I said so. Everything gone. Suitcase, everything. After she promised me! She promised so I could go. It meant I would have to stay, and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I had to get away. Do you see?”
“You were upset because she was gone. You had been out somewhere, and you came back and she was gone, is that right?”
Miss Scott’s eyes filled with tears and she nodded.
“Did she leave you a note or anything to explain where she was going?”
“No! Nothing! I looked everywhere. There was nothing!”
Something stirred at the back of Terrell’s mind. He wanted to capture it, to clarify it, but it eluded him.
“So, then, you didn’t find a note. Do you remember what happened next? You looked everywhere for a note, and then, did someone come to the door?”
He was not prepared for the terror that appeared suddenly in her eyes. “No. No, he couldn’t. Not after that, he couldn’t.” Miss Scott sat up, looking wildly around the room, and then began to rock and cry. “Wendy went to see him. I should have said something. I should have. Now look what happened!” Her sobbing became uncontrollable.
“I think that’s all for tonight, Constable. She is very agitated. We’ll take over from here. She’ll need a draught to calm down and be able to sleep.” Dr. Edison was by his side now, showing him the door. “Sister, if you could come in here, please,” she called out to the desk in the hall.
Terrell stood in the hall with Darling, watching the calm but hurried efforts to bring Miss Scott down from her distress.
Darling put on his hat and turned to the door. “And that’s that. Hope you got something.”
“I got something, sir, but I’m damned if I know what. Nothing about the car though. And I wanted to ask her if she’d received poison-pen notes. She went to pieces before I had a chance to ask either thing. It’s becoming an annoying habit. And she kept saying it was all her fault, that she should have said something, that Miss Keeling had gone to see him. Perhaps she meant that she should have warned Miss Keeling not to go see him because he would get so furious about having anyone say anything to him about Samuel.”
“Perhaps, indeed.” This was interesting. Very interesting. Darling had his hat off already as he pushed open the door of the police station. “Ames here?” he asked O’Brien.
O’Brien gestured at the upper floor with his chin, and then said, “You’ve had a call, sir, from your lady wife. You’re to call back right away. Good to see she’s keeping you busy, sir.”
Darling looked at his watch. It was barely after three thirty. She must have rushed home from school. He picked up the phone and had a call placed to King’s Cove, tapping his fingers on his desk while he waited. It was picked up instantly.
“KC 431. Lane Winslow speaking.”
“Darling?”
“Oh, thank you for being so quick. Listen, Samuel told me today that Miss Keeling had visited his father at their house. ‘The day before my father left,’ he said. That would have made it the Thursday. They had a whopping row.” Lane gave him as word perfect a narration as she could remember.
“He said exactly that? She would make sure he didn’t hurt him anymore?”
“Yes. But, I don’t know. Could a woman like that have taken it to those extremes?”
“I’m afraid you’d be surprised by who is perfectly capable of taking things to those extremes.” When he’d hung up, Darling sat for a couple of seconds and then bounded out of his chair and made for Ames’s office.
“Miss Keeling went to Gaskell’s house the day before he died and threatened him. This matches what garbled information we got from Miss Scott today. We’ve got to find her. This opens the possibility that she is very much in the picture. Gilly and I have just had a look at an abandoned car a few miles out of Balfour. Call Van Eyck and get them to tow it to the garage and assess the damage to the car. Then run out and have a look at the thing yourself. Report back. It seems to me to be possible it’s the car that could have been involved, and that Miss Keeling could have been driving it.”
“Sir?” Ames said, trying to still a slight alarm that turning up at the garage would surely look as though he’d asked for the assignment and was using it as a flimsy excuse to see Miss Van Eyck.
“No quibbling. Run along. I’ll get Terrell to get back onto the RCMP to redouble their efforts.”
Having delivered this instruction to Terrell, Darling sat at his desk, and then swung his chair around to look at the snow-covered street outside his window with his hands behind his head to think about how Miss Keeling could have abandoned the car in an orchard and then disappeared. And whose car was it? In some scenarios either car would work. Here was certainly an even better motive than her upset about the notes aimed at Miss Scott: her anger about Samuel’s condition and his abusive treatment of her. If she had the nerve to confront him in his own house, she could have pursued him into town, found him drunk, and run him down with his own car, or she could have used Miss Scott’s car. It would need a lot of teasing out.
July 1947
THE LONG PORCH at the community hall in Balfour was strung with lights, and the warm evening had driven dancers outside to cool off and smoke. The band members were taking a break and drinking beer at their seats onstage. Lively business was being conducted at the bar and cakes and sandwiches that had weathered the afternoon Dominion Day picnic on the grounds were on offer.
Rose Scott was propped on the railing leaning against a pillar, looking out into the moonlit semi-darkness of the night, past the reach of the building lights toward the lake. A light winked on and off somewhere on the water. Someone who had spent Dominion Day fishing, no doubt, on the way home. She was feeling a kind of relief at the end of the school year. It was her fourth at the Balfour school and she was looking forward to going home, in spite of her mother’s constant pressure on her to get married and settle down. She was longing for a cigarette, but that was firmly in the category of things teachers did in private. The moon would be full in the next couple of days. She remembered reading somewhere that some people got a bit crazy as the full moon approached, even more than on the full moon itself. She looked out at the velvet darkness and longed again for a cigarette. The full moon was certainly a reason some of her teacher colleagues used to give for the kids being a little more rambunctious.
Mrs. Bertolli waved at her and pushed her way through the crowd on the porch. “Miss Scott, how lovely! You must be absolutely exhausted after another year with the boys. I can’t thank you enough. They seem to really enjoy the lessons.”
Miss Scott pulled herself off the railing and smiled. “They’re lovely boys, Mrs. Bertolli. I think Philip has the makings of a scientist.”
“Well, I’m glad he has the makings of something. They’re growing up like wild animals. They’ll spend the whole summer up trees and crashing around in the bush. I’m afraid all your hard-won gains will have evaporated by the end of the summer and you’ll have to start all over again.”
“It’s the best way to grow up, surely? And I didn’t find that to be true this last year. You are one of the families that supplies the children with books, and they seem to read them, so there’s nothing you need to worry about.”
“What will you do this summer?” Angela asked.
“I’ll go home to Winnipeg, I expect. My mother has a good deal of work on the farm, and I’ll help her.”
“Well, you see you come back. Here’s a little something to thank you.” Angela opened her handbag and pulled out a package with green ribbon on it.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have.” It proved to be a bottle of violet eau de cologne, the scent, Miss Scott thought rebelliously, of unmarried women everywhere. “It’s lovely. Thank you.”
“Oh, nonsense! Oops, there’s David waving at me! I had him take the boys home after the picnic and he’s come back for me. See you in September!” Angela waved cheerfully, her gloved hand suddenly animated in the glow thrown by the hanging lights.
The Bertolli family was the only one that gave her a little gift at the end of the year, though many of the children had made her cards, and families plied her with baked goods all year long. Holding the bottle of perfume cradled in her hands, she perched herself back up on the porch railing and prepared not to be approached again. Much to her dismay, this hope was dashed. She had no sooner settled down when a very drunk Mr. Gaskell approached her, cigarette hanging from his mouth.
“Not dancing then?” He leaned on the pillar so that his breath and cigarette smoke were wafting directly onto her face.
She shifted away. “No, Mr. Gaskell. Just looking for a moment’s quiet.” She was surprised by his approach. They had been at loggerheads about his son, Samuel, for most of the year. Gaskell had told her to mind her own business when she asked if Samuel had a warmer sweater. He had protested angrily that he didn’t need charity when she gave the boy an apple at lunch or lent him a book. He pointedly returned the book and sent the boy to school with two apples, one to be paid in cancellation of the debt to the teacher. She wished with each of these interactions that his wife could be the one to come to the school, but she was fearful of suggesting it and creating tension between Gaskell and his wife. She quickly glanced past him. Where was his wife now?
“Mr. Gaskell’s a bit formal. How about just Jim, eh? We know all about the army Jezebel, eh?” He pulled his cigarette out of his mouth with one hand and ran his other over her clasped hands, pressing down on them in a way that made her stomach lurch.
She stood up, feeling disgusted and horrified. “I’ll say good night, Mr. Gaskell.” Miss Scott wound through the crowd gathered on the porch, nodding and saying good night.
“You’re not leaving yet?” said Mrs. Bales. She had no children at the school anymore, but she liked Miss Scott.
“I’m afraid I must,” Miss Scott muttered.
“Playing hard to get like any army tart!” This outburst from Gaskell silenced the noisy, laughing throng. Miss Scott felt heat pour into her cheeks and she scrambled down the stairs and along the path to where the cars were parked on the baseball field, but instead of going to her car, she walked past the parking lot to the edge of the lake. The gentle ripple of the water curling onto the gravelly sand and the reflection of the moonlight on the dark water soothed her nerves. The noise of the party fell into the distant background and the enveloping silence of the summer night surrounded her. The “hoo” of a great horned owl sounded in the trees behind her, and then the rustle and flapping of wings as it took flight. She had loved it out here. She was sorry to be leaving for the summer because the summers were so lovely, but her mother did need her at the farm. She was even sorrier that her enjoyment of the Dominion Day dance had been ruined by that dreadful man. She sat on a log emitting a great sigh. What had he meant, calling her a Jezebel? Perhaps, like her father, he didn’t approve of women in the army. She shook her head and lit up another cigarette, enjoying the blissful solitude, and only then wondered, with jarring disquiet, how he knew she’d even been in the army.
“The nerve of the man!” Angela Bertolli exclaimed to her husband, who’d had to come as far as the porch to collect his wife, as she seemed incapable of escaping all the other parents. “Poor Miss Scott. It’s really too bad! I wonder if I should run down to her place and see that she’s all right.”
“I bet she can hold her own. She’s been through the war after all.” Back at the car, David rolled down the station wagon window to let in the warm night air.
“I hardly think you can call our children ‘the war’!”
“I’m not so sure about that, but that’s not what I mean. She was in the army corps, I think, and got quite close to the action. Was a clerk at bases behind enemy lines. She told me that once when I picked the boys up. We were talking about what it takes to be a teacher. She told me to keep mum, though. She didn’t seem to want anyone to know.”
“No wonder she’s so good at controlling that mob of children! But that Gaskell is a horror. You know the boys were telling me the other day that he hits little Samuel. Judging by tonight’s behaviour, he’s a drunk as well. I hope she doesn’t take it to heart. She’s worth a thousand of him. It’s a crying shame she had to leave the party.”
ROSE SCOTT, FEELING more herself after a visit to the water, parked the car at the side of the house as usual. The cottage looked almost sinister, with its dark windows and its isolation. Her feeling of tranquility shaken by a sudden reluctance to leave the safety of her car, she turned her mind to Gaskell. He lived just west of her. Though his house was a quarter mile away, it suddenly felt too close.
Her heart was pounding. She wanted to cry with frustration at her encounter with him but was determined not to. She looked at the cabin, a line of cold light from the nearly full moon along the east part of the roof. When she had moved in, she had liked how the cabin was nestled in the trees, but now these same trees seemed to harbour all that was menacing. It was ridiculous. She was behaving like a child who imagined a bogeyman under the bed!
With resolve, she unlocked her car door, took up her handbag, and walked up the steps. She swallowed an anxious breath as she opened the unlocked door and went inside, wondering if the habit of never locking the cottage door was such a good idea.
The curtains were closed. It was the first thing she noticed, because the house was so dark inside. She anxiously reached for the light switch, but her hand was shaking a little and she had to reach farther than she thought, and she fumbled. She was sure she’d left the curtains open when she’d gone off to the Dominion Day celebrations just after one. She’d never have shut them. She managed the switch and light flooded the little room. Her heart pounding now, she stood by the open doorway and looked around the room. Nothing.
That bastard Gaskell, drunk and insinuating and then shouting obscenities for all to hear, had really frightened her. She closed the door and dropped the hooked latch, and then went to the sink for a glass of water. Her fear was slowly giving way to fury. How dare he? She pulled the kitchen curtain open a little to see the lake and the reflection of the nearly full moon across the water. It would calm her.
The noise came from behind her, right inside the house, and her heart froze. She wheeled around in time to see Gaskell coming out of her bedroom. Something between a gasp and a shriek escaped unbidden from her lips. A particular horror that he’d been in her bedroom swept through her. She saw now that he could have been in her house any number of times, going through her things, touching her clothes. She shuddered convulsively and edged toward the door, her mind already racing ahead to how she could undo the latch without turning her back to him. Faster than she could have imagined possible, he darted at the door and leaned heavily against it, facing her.
“Going somewhere?”
His breath reeked. How drunk was he? She had faced drunks before, in the army, but they had at least had the restraint of facing possible charges from senior officers. This time she felt the deep fear of facing a man absolutely on her own who was both inebriated and had nothing to stop his worst instincts. Hardly knowing how, she had the bread knife in her hand.
“Get out!” She didn’t recognize her own voice. “I mean it. I’ll use it!”
Gaskell put his hands up and smiled sloppily at her. “You don’t mean that. An army whore like you. You’ve just been waiting for it.” He let his arms drop and then reached for her wrist, his expression changing to a kind of leer.
With a cry she lashed at his hand with the knife. She could feel it connecting, sliding off his cuff onto his wrist, slicing into flesh. Gaskell recoiled with a shout of rage, clutching at his cut with his other hand. She could see the blood welling between his fingers.
“Get out! Get out! Get out!” She was screaming now, holding the knife with two hands at chest height.
He looked at his hand and reached for the latch with his left hand, flipping it up, and pulled the door open, still facing her. With a last imprecation that she could scarcely hear with the panicked buzzing in her own ears, he stumbled onto the small porch. She slammed the door and threw the knife on the floor and put the latch down. She found her keys where she’d put them and tried to fit the skeleton key into the lock. She could hear him stumbling down the stairs, swearing. Finally! The key slid in and she tried to calm the shaking of her hands enough to turn it, to hear the click as it took.
She stood for a moment, listening. Gaskell’s obscenities were receding. With a sob she collapsed on the floor and leaned back against the door, shuddering and crying with rage.
Thursday, December 4
THE SITTING ROOM in the Shaughnessy house where the Devlins lived was warm from the fire. Light flickered along the walls and highlighted the thick green velvet drapes that kept out the wet December chill. Drinks had been brought and Serena sat with hers on the sofa, leafing through a magazine, while Harry stood looking into the fire, one hand resting on the mantel. Here at least he could forget the vastness of the house around them, full of empty rooms, childless and silent.
“I think it’s time you told me what you’ve been up to, don’t you?” Harry turned to Serena, who looked up at him, her expression unreadable.
“Do you? You’ve never cared before.”
“I don’t buy that balderdash that you’ve been to see your mother, something you usually avoid like the plague.” He’d give her a chance, wait to see if she came through.
“Mother’s not been well.”
“I see.” Devlin waited. “I had a man come by the office late last month. Scruffy fellow. Said you’d been to see him. Not your type at all, I should have thought.” Devlin sat in the chair opposite her and crossed his legs, then he downed his drink and put the glass on the round occasional table with a thunk.
“So, I’m the one with something to hide? The trouble with you is that you’re guileless. You go through the world like a puppy with your tongue hanging out, charmingly oblivious to what’s good for you. You’re an absolute child. I suppose that’s what makes you so attractive to the voters. That scruffy man was the husband of the woman you took to bed when you were, what, in your early twenties?” Devlin sat staring at her. He was disoriented suddenly by the feeling that he was just now seeing her for the first time.
Serena gave a little chuckle. “Nothing to say? That’s precisely why you need a keeper. Do you think you would have got this far without me? Oh, I see, you’re wondering how I knew. It was that woman with the extraordinary eyes on the fishing boat. She must have been a doozy twenty-five years ago. Her workmates were happy to fill me in. After we left, she apparently said she ‘knew’ you all those years ago. It wasn’t hard for them to guess how. They knew she’d left a bad marriage, and even knew she had a grown-up child somewhere that she never talks about. She actually told someone there that her husband was furious at the thought of bringing up someone else’s child.”
“That can’t matter to you in the least, something I did in my youth. You’re being ridiculous, and you can’t be sure about the child,” Devlin finally managed.
“It’s the child, I’m concerned about. A love child suddenly springing out of the undergrowth demanding money, or worse, recognition, will be the death knell to your career and utter humiliation to me. I have relatives who specialize in this sort of research, and if I could find it all out in the blink of an eye, so could the opposition.”
“That’s rubbish.” He found he didn’t want to ask about her relatives. He thought instead about the girl. “She can’t possibly know. Her father took her to live with relatives in some religious community. He told me that.” Had Irving told her? Of course, he must have.
“So, you’ve been talking to someone as well about it. I’m delighted to learn you are smart enough to be concerned.” She got up and put her glass down. “I’ll have to go see about the cottage. The workmen are impossibly slow. They’ve gone off, claiming they have another more urgent project. Obviously, I will have to go supervise them in person. I’ll leave first thing. With any luck, we’ll get through this by-election before this comes out.”
AFTER SHE LEFT, Devlin, alone in the sitting room with only the sound of the murmuring fire, turned his thoughts to the daughter. It surprised him that what was uppermost in his mind was that Serena was wrong. It was not the danger his daughter posed, but the thrill of knowing, acknowledging, there was a daughter at all. Denise had drifted out of his life, had never contacted him to tell him about the birth of the baby, and he had forgotten about her and moved on. Only, of course, he hadn’t. In the years that followed until he married Serena, beautiful, well-heeled, twenty years his junior, he had never met a woman who affected him as Denise had. Even on the boat, she had refused to tell him anything except that her husband had dispensed with her at some point. It had shocked him that, even now, Denise had the power to unnerve him. He wondered now if this was what love felt like.
WENDY KEELING WALKED down the hill from the school knowing that she would have to leave here as well. Her heart ached. This was going to be her life. Always on the run.
She had tidied the classroom and put everything in place for whoever came to replace her. She thought about taking the revolver, but it suddenly felt like something too dangerous for her to have. Her rage at Gaskell had taught her that. It frightened her. Anyway, her father knew she was a teacher. He’d look for her at school, if he tracked down where she was. He’d done that last time, in Saanich. She stopped at the store to pick up some flour and milk. She and Rose could have a last weekend together, and she would ask Rose to drive her to the station. She felt a momentary pang for her colleague, who was meant to be leaving the next day. Wendy would go east. Northern Saskatchewan, Ontario. There must be somewhere he would not come for her. She swallowed another rush of anger. Gaskell, her father. Was she never to know any peace?
It was already dark, and the headlights of a single car driving north illuminated the snowy landscape of the road, while the rest of the world was encompassed in inky darkness. She waited until it had passed and then crossed the road and walked south toward the turnoff to the cottage. The dark bulk of a car was parked a hundred yards farther ahead on the side of the main road at the top of their neighbour’s drive. There appeared to be no one in it. Perhaps the driver hadn’t wanted to attempt the rough and slippery descent to the house. She felt a flash of worry and hurried more quickly down their drive to the cottage, returning her thoughts to the business of packing, and how Rose would take the news of her leaving. Well, it couldn’t be helped. They’d get someone in soon, and the two of them could get on with their lives, she with her fleeing, something that in this, her third time, she felt almost adept at, and Rose to her marriage.
It was the strangeness of finding the house empty that caused her first anxiety; where was Rose? The car was gone, the stove was unlit, and the silence inside the cottage almost reverberated. She put the groceries on the counter and felt the press of fear returning. Now the car parked up on the main road suddenly loomed large in her mind. Why would someone park there? Rose had told her that their neighbour on that side was an older couple who kept to themselves.
What if there had been someone in the car, watching her? Angry now that she’d left the gun, logic deserted her, and she ran to her room and pulled her suitcase out from under her bed and began yanking clothes off the hangers and out of the drawers. With shaking fingers, she started to try to press the latches on the suitcase and then she remembered her toiletries. She hurried into the bathroom and stopped, trying to get hold of herself. Clutching the sink with both hands, she looked at herself in the mirror. She was shaking and she leaned into the rim of the sink harder to still the trembling. Tears welled up. It was no good. She could bob her hair, change her name, find a calling that she loved, that made her independent and free from them, none of it made any difference. She was always evil, always the carrier of her mother’s sin. They would always be looking for her.
She took up the hairbrush on the shelf beside the sink, and in the grip of an impotent rage struck the mirror so that it cracked through the middle. She could see her own face, reflected now in the jagged edges, distorted, angry, irreparably broken.
It was only when she’d pushed the last of her possessions into the suitcase and was thinking about calling a taxi to come from Nelson to get her that she heard the car coming slowly down the road. She saw the headlights sweep around, causing the surrounding trees and bush to appear for a brief moment and then disappear again into the darkness. The car came to rest facing the house, like some fire-breathing demon that would not leave without her.
Tuesday, December 16
LANE STOOD ON the steps of the school watching the Bertolli boys playing in the snow while they waited to be picked up. She was smiling, remembering her own palpable relief when lessons were over as a child, that burst of freedom to go and play. Even in the rarefied world of the tutors and governesses that had passed as schooling for her and her sister, the sense of freedom from grown-ups, at least until dinnertime, was wonderful.
Indeed, she was feeling a bit of relief and even triumph that she’d survived the last few days as a schoolteacher. Finally, she heard the car coming up the hill. “Okay, boys, you’d better brush yourselves off; your mum is here!” she called out.
The station wagon pulled up and instead of waiting, as she usually did, for the boys to pile in, Angela got out and waved her friend over. Lane came down the steps, wishing she’d put her jacket on if she was going to stand around talking in the snow and darkening afternoon.
Angela drew near and practically whispered, “There’s something very strange going on up at that house! The dogs and I were nearly killed by that car! And I saw blood. I guess it was an animal looking to get into the coal chute, but it was creepy.” She looked nervously toward where the boys, having completely ignored Lane’s exhortation to brush off the snow and get ready to go home, were now darting in and out of the underbrush avoiding snowballs.
“Goodness. Slow down! You went up to the Anscomb house, and someone was up there? What car?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I was halfway up the road and a car plowed down at speed. They didn’t even see me. I had to jump into a snowbank.”
“They?” asked Lane. “Did you see who was in the car?”
Angela shook her head ruefully. “I was too busy cracking my hip on a rock buried in the snow.”
“What kind of car was it? Surely it was the builders?”
“Not in a car like that! All I saw was a black car . . . oh . . . and maybe a flash of red. Like a red insignia. Anyway, I went up to the house, and the dogs were back at that coal shuttle, sniffing and making noises. I opened it . . .”
“You never! You’re as bad as I am!”
“I did, and a very peculiar smell was coming from it, I can tell you. I know, I know, it’s only the workmen.”
Lane smiled. “It could just be one of the workmen popping behind the house to relieve himself.”
“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. But why should they if there’s perfectly good plumbing inside? Unless they haven’t finished putting it in. It just seems strange. Of course, I’ve always thought that house was a bit spooky.”
Lane shook her head. “I wouldn’t worry too much about the blood. Perhaps the builder cut his hand. Maybe he was rushing off in the car to get it seen to. But I tell you what. I’ll go with you on Saturday and we can have a good look. It’s so close to Christmas now, I doubt the builders will be back till the holiday is over.”
She wondered, as she watched Angela drive down the hill and was enveloped in the blissful silence that she and her boys left behind, if she was a bad influence on Angela. Still, she thought, turning back into the school, it was odd. It wasn’t the builders’ van that had run her friend off the road; it was a black car, and plainly in a hurry. Was this the same car that had been seen outside the teacher’s cottage?
