Burden of Memory (17 page)
“No, I have not been smoking.” The girl rose to her feet. “And don’t you dare accuse me. I didn’t start it.” She stared at Elliot until her uncle looked away.
It seemed to Elaine that all the hows didn’t matter one whit. It was the whys that they should be concerned about. She had questions of her own to ask, but hesitated, unsure if it would be wiser to remain unobtrusive. This wasn’t her family, or her home.
The moment to speak passed as Weiss dug appreciatively into his sandwich. They pretended not to notice as droplets of olive oil dripped down his numerous chins.
In retrospect, Elaine’s silence was a mistake of enormous proportions. She would spend many sleepless nights wondering if a life could have been saved if she had spoken up.
Lunch over, the family scattered. Moira pronounced herself ready for a nap. It was obvious to all that she was about to drop on the spot, and Alison and Phoebe hustled her upstairs. Megan announced with some degree of drama that she was quite exhausted and also in need of sleep. Elliot said that he would be in the library watching the game. Alan went to see to the dogs while Charles escorted Mr. Weiss back to his truck.
Elaine wanted only to get away for a while. This would be a good time to get her car out of hibernation. She’d driven into Bracebridge once, to buy tapes for the recorder, but otherwise hadn’t taken out the car for the nearly three weeks that she’d been here.
She followed Charles and Weiss to the back door. Pulling on her hiking boots and taking her coat down from the hook by the door, she could hear them outside, talking in low voices.
So much for keeping everyone informed.
Dave and Amber were crossing the yard. They walked close together, almost touching, but pulled apart as soon as they saw that they were being watched. Amber’s pretty face was flushed, making her look all of about twelve years old, and Dave had an expression that would be a perfect match to that of a cat who had swallowed a whole bottle of cream.
“I suggest you have a talk with that young man over there.” Charles pointed directly at Dave. “He’s been hanging around here a good deal more than one would expect. He and his friends. Ask them where they were last night.”
Dave smiled; to Elaine it looked like the smile of a crocodile. His body was appeared relaxed, but his hands were clenched into fists at his side. “If you have something to say to me, sir, I’d prefer if you’d say it to my face.”
Amber reached for Dave’s arm. He shrugged her off.
“What’s this about?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Surely, you can’t think that Dave had anything to do with what happened last night!”
Weiss appeared to be a country hick, fat and slow on the uptake, but he knew his job, and his ears pricked to attention. “Do you know something about the fire here last night?” he asked Dave.
“No, I don’t. Sorry. If you’ll excuse us, Amber has offered me some lunch.”
“You started that fire, you ignorant son-of-a-bitch!” Charles roared and stumbled down the steps, scarcely able to stand straight in his rage. “You could have killed us all.” He grabbed Dave by the front of his T-shirt and shook the boy like an aging fox with a rabbit in his jaws.
Lizzie ran out of the house to stand on the steps behind Elaine. Alan tore around the corner of the cottage, the dogs at his heels. Hamlet and Ophelia took one look at the scene and, not knowing who was the invader, barked at everyone.
“No,” Elaine screamed at the look of red rage that crossed behind Dave’s small black eyes. If there hadn’t been an audience, she was sure that Dave would have struck out. However, rather than deliver the strong punch that the look seemed to be forecasting, he simply raised both his hands, palms out, and pushed Charles away with about as much force as swatting at a mosquito. The old man staggered backwards, tripped over a stone, and fell heavily.
Even over the racket of the dogs, the yelling of the men, the frightened gasps of the onlookers, Elaine could hear the sickening sound of a brittle, osteoporosis-riddled bone cracking as Charles’ arm collapsed under his inconsiderable weight.
He made not a sound, but the color drained out of his face like water being emptied from a bathtub. Weiss, Elaine, Lizzie, and Alan rushed to help the old man up. Amber lifted one hand to her mouth and chewed on her knuckles. Dave grinned, looking as if he had survived a round with a world-class prizefighter instead of pushing an octogenarian to the ground.
“We’d better get you to the hospital, Mr. Stoughton,” Alan said.
Charles gasped for breath. “Okay.” Some of the color returned to his face, not much, but enough to bring it back to a semblance of life. “But first, I insist that you arrest that man. You saw him attack me, Weiss. You saw it all. You have powers of arrest, don’t you? Use them. Imagine, attacking an old man. That punk attacked me.”
“What,” Dave yelled. “You started it. I barely touched you. Isn’t that right, Amber?”
Amber looked from her great-uncle to Dave and burst into tears.
“An old man,” Alan shouted, “you have to fight an old man. I’d like to see you try it on me.”
Dave assumed a fighter’s stance, dancing on his toes, his fists up. “I’m ready. Come on then.”
Now Ophelia and Hamlet had a target. They followed Alan’s lead, pulled back their teeth and growled deep in their throats as they moved on lowered haunches.
“Only kidding,” Dave shouted, folding his hands across his chest and opening his fingers in submission. “I barely touched the old man. It was an accident. I’m a guest of Amber. Tell them, Amber.”
“Arrest him,” Charles repeated. He leaned against Elaine. He was tall, but bent with old age and new pain, he matched Elaine’s height. She slipped her arm tightly around his body. There was no layer of fat to cushion the old bones.
Weiss shuffled his feet. “I’m afraid, Mr. Stoughton, that what I saw was an unfortunate accident.”
Dave might try to appear all friendly and innocent, Elaine thought, but a slow fire burned deep inside him and she didn’t trust him one inch.
“I’ll take Mr. Stoughton to the hospital,” she said.
“I couldn’t impose,” Charles whispered, the pain superseding his anger. “Alan will take me.”
“Look.” She forced a smile and held up one hand, in which she still clutched her car keys. “I was going for a drive anyway. No imposition.”
“I’ll help you.” Lizzie plucked the keys from Elaine’s hand and led the way up the hill to the cars. “I’ll tell Alison and Elliot what’s happened and I’m sure they’ll follow you.”
Now that the dogs actually had someone in their sights, Alan had his hands full, dragging them away from their intended prey.
Fortunately it was Charles’ arm that was broken, not a leg, otherwise he never would have managed to squeeze into Elaine’s BMW. His face had again turned a ghastly white and his lips contorted with pain as he settled into the leather seat. He reached out the hand of his good left arm to stop Elaine as she put the key into the ignition. “Call Weiss over.”
She obeyed and Weiss lowered his bulk as much as he was able to squat beside the car window.
“I want you back here tonight, after I get home from the hospital. We still have business to discuss. I want that scum and his no-good friends off my property, today!”
“I don’t….”
“They started that fire, and I expect you to prove it.” With a sigh that spoke volumes, Charles collapsed back against the soft brown leather of the seat and closed his eyes.
Elaine turned the key, remembering as she did so that the car hadn’t been on the road for a week or more. The surface was covered in a fine miasma of dust, but the engine caught the first time and roared into life, glad to be back to work. She soaked the windows with anti-freeze and switched on the wipers to scrape them clean.
She let the engine go and roared down the country lanes at a speed that would have had the late Augustus screaming for mercy. Feeling a bit guilty at enjoying the moment, she peeked out of the corner of her eye at her passenger. Charles’ eyes were closed and he was a horrid color but his breathing remained steady. Perhaps she would drop him at the entrance to Emergency and continue on her way. Leaving the Madisons and all their hang-ups to themselves.
But she thought of Moira: her wonderful letters and her dominating family and her fierce determination to be her own woman. And a story she, Elaine, wanted—now needed—to tell.
The hospital wasn’t busy, and they attended to Charles immediately. While Elaine waited, she flicked through piles of ancient copies of
Reader’s Digests
and
National Geographics
. Almost as good as traveling through a time machine. She didn’t have to read for long before a nurse clutching a packet of x-rays escorted Charles back to the waiting room. At that moment, Alison and Brad burst through the swinging door.
“For heaven’s sake,” Alison exclaimed. She was as disheveled as she had been at lunch. Worse because she had rubbed at her face, leaving black mascara smudged into dark bruises under her eyes.
“You okay, Uncle Charles?” asked Brad.
“Just a fall, young man, can’t get this old chap down yet,” Charles chucked with bonhomie so false Elaine expected the hovering nurse to boo. “I stood up to Hitler, I can stand up to some young punk, eh?”
“Uh, right.” Brad obviously couldn’t quite see what Hitler had to do with all this.
“God, this is all getting too much,” Alison said. “A nice, pleasant family Thanksgiving this has turned out to be.”
“I need to take Mr. Stoughton through to see the doctor now,” the nurse said. “Are you the family?”
“We are,” Alison said, lifting her chin proudly.
“Then you can come with me.”
“Brad, go and get your grandma, then meet us back here. We had a call from the hospital as we were leaving,” Alison explained to Charles and Elaine. “Mom is ready to come home, so we thought that we could pick you both up at the same time. Isn’t that nice?” Her expression indicated that it was anything but. “We came in two cars, so you can leave, Elaine. The family will manage from here.”
Properly dismissed, and not sorry about it, Elaine abandoned her copy of
National Geographic
(January 1980: a cover photograph of Jupiter, taken by Voyager, but looking much more like a Georges Seurat pointillist painting) and returned to her car.
She needed a short walk to clear her head, full as it was of half formed ideas and images, all swirling around, caught in a hurricane, everything moving but nothing settling. Weiss seemed to know his job. If he said the fire had been started deliberately, then arson it surely was. The question then: who would have reason to burn down the storage building? And potentially the cottage as well. Left unattended for a few more minutes the fire might easily have made the jump from one building to the other. To where the family were sound asleep in their beds. Charles suspected Dave and his friends camping out on the island. Dave, she could happily imagine being responsible, but he appeared to have no reason. As for Rachel and Kyle and the others, the idea was preposterous. They cared for Moira, and no one was more vulnerable in a house fire than the elderly and infirm.
There was no sign that anyone had broken into the old guesthouse, or so Alan had reported. But that didn’t mean much—Alan locked the building every night, but the keys were kept on a hook in the kitchen, available to anyone in the house.
Not set intentionally perhaps? Phoebe had not been smoking up in the loft; of that Elaine was certain. She’d never seen the black-clad, black-makeup drenched girl smoke. But there was no need for anyone else to go up there after she and Phoebe had finished for the day.
Or maybe there was?
Who knew what reasons people had in a family as complex as the Madisons.
The hospital was close to the center of the small resort town of Bracebridge. She wandered through the streets without noticing her surroundings. A weekday in autumn, the tourists were few on the ground, and most locals were still resting up from the delights of their own Thanksgiving repast.
She stopped at a convenience store to stock up on bags of chips and chocolate bars. Lizzie’s cooking was nothing short of amazing but Elaine felt herself to be in desperate need of a jolt of something perfectly junky and overloaded with fat and sugar.
When she got back to her car, several of the local teenagers were hanging about, all baggy pants, enormous running shoes and flannel shirts, sparse beards and numerous, imaginative piercings. They leaned on the hood, smoking cigarettes, and stared openly at Elaine as she pulled her keys out of her jacket pocket.
“Good day, gentlemen. If you’ll step aside, I can be on my way.” She grinned. “You like my car, eh?”
“Yea, real nice.” One of the boys, cigarette drooping out of the corner of his mouth, gaped in unadulterated envy. On cue, they stepped back to allow Elaine to unlock the door and slip smoothly behind the wheel. The engine started with the most delicate of touches to the ignition and purred like a kitten being scratched under its chin. Waving gaily to her circle of admirers she pulled out into the non-existent traffic.
Deciding not to run away after all, Elaine headed back to the cottage. The road wound between patches of open lakes, large and small, and rushing rivers. Flashes of sun-reflecting blue flashed through the green and brown of the woods.
When she got back, Elliot told her that Moira would be indisposed for the rest of the day. Gratefully Elaine informed Lizzie that she would not be down for dinner and crawled upstairs to her welcome bed. It had been one really long day.
“Killed who?” Moira asked.
“Amy Murphy. I killed her.”
“Moira, it’s time to go.” A group of her fellow sisters stood on the top of the cliffs that towered over the stretch of rocky beach and the sea beyond. Hard to know how long they had been calling, waving, and generally making a fuss trying to catch her attention.
Jean started down the steps towards them. Moira pushed Ralph out of her lap and jumped to her feet. “I’ll come later,” she shouted, waving for them to leave.
Jean hesitated. She yelled something unintelligible.
“Ralph will see me home. I’ll be all right,” Moira called, trying to smile.
For God’s sake go away.
Jean shrugged and made her way back up the stairs.
Moira dragged Ralph to his feet. “That’s not funny.”
“I killed her, M. I killed her.”
Tumbling memories. A pretty, cheerful maid. Wild red curls barely contained under a stiff cap, belt pulled in a bit too tight, dancing freckles and a wide smile. Mother complaining that she was “most unhappy with Amy. The girl has airs above her station.”
Summer 1939. The last good summer. A sleepless Moira looking for a book, finding instead—Ralph, hair tussled and face scratched, shirt hanging out of his pants, creeping up the staircase without turning on any lights. A sly wink and a finger to the lips as he passed. In those days the upper servants had rooms on the third floor and the lower servants, like Amy Murphy, slept in separate cabins on the grounds.
“I killed her, M. She came to me one night. The night after Paul splashed his brains all over me. And she told me that it’s my turn to die. She said I’m a coward, and I deserve to die. Because she died.”
“Ralph. Listen to me. You had a dream. One of Mother’s maids isn’t going to visit you in Italy in the middle of the night to make threats. It was a dream. That’s all.”
“Not a dream. Not. She was there.” He gripped her arms and shook her with sufficient force that her teeth rattled. When she undressed for the night Moira would see a line of finger-size bruises marching across her upper arms, in proper military formation.
“Stop it, Ralph. Listen to me. They’re doing some wonderful work in the psychiatric units these days.”
“I’m not crazy, Moira. I killed her.”
“Then tell me about it.” She didn’t want to hear. Wanted to run with her hands over her ears and her head down. Run back to the hospital and the crowded wards, the exhausted sisters and broken men. But Ralph needed to talk, and only she was there to listen.
They sat back down. The sun close to a memory, a blaze of orange and crimson lighting up the gentle sea, a cool breeze blowing inland. They were the only people left on the beach.
“Do you remember, her? Amy?” Ralph asked.
“Yes, I do. She was very pretty. I remember that you were mean to her sometimes, although you probably thought that you were only teasing. She ran away one day. We were all at the cottage, except for Father of course. Even Grandfather was there; I remember he came up a great deal more that summer than was his custom. As if he knew that 1939 was going to be the last peaceful summer for a long time. Perhaps forever.
“She took her few things and left without telling Mrs. Czarnecki or anyone. Mother was most upset. Amy never even sent for her clothes back at the Toronto house.”
“She never left, Moira. Never. She’s still there.” His breath caught in his throat. “Except when she’s here. In Italy. With me.”
Moira’s chest clenched. She remembered well the day Amy had disappeared: Mrs. Brooks, the cook, rushing in full of apologies to serve the breakfast herself; Grandfather complaining that the toast was cold, and where was his marmalade—he
always
had marmalade; a sour faced Mrs. Czarnecki carrying clean towels up the stairs, grumbling at every step.
But what Moira remembered most of all was that Ralph had gone. Lazy, indolent Ralph had gotten up before the rest of the family and returned to Toronto. He left a scribbled note on his mother’s writing desk explaining that he had forgotten an appointment. She remembered Megan and Maeve, wide eyed, speculating out on the dock that their brother had run off with the maid. Of course, no such thing had happened. Mother phoned home to be told by Father’s valet that Ralph had arrived at the house early in the afternoon.
In her mind, whenever Moira thought about the disappearing Amy (which wasn’t often, she realized with a pang of guilt) she assumed that the fool girl had run off after a brief affair with Ralph. No one mentioned the matter again. Amy’s few possessions were packed up in a box and shipped to her only surviving relative, a sister in New York.
Only a few days later war broke out in Europe, so who had time to think about the strange disappearance of a servant girl?
But someone, obviously, had.
“Did you kill Amy, Ralph?” Moira asked, her voice level and calm.
“I might as well have.”
“Good. That means that you didn’t. Do you want to tell me about it? I suspect that we’ve missed the ferry to the mainland. So we have all the time in the world.”
“She was in love with me. I never told her she should be. I never lied.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
Ralph looked at her over his shoulder.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, you idiot. I’m an Army Nurse. I do know what sexual intercourse is.”
He blushed. It gave him an innocent, little boy look that she had never seen before. “Yes, I slept with her, most of that summer. It was a nice summer, wasn’t it M?”
“Remind me about her. Did you love her?”
The little boy disappeared. “Of course not. You want to talk like a soldier? She was a common slut. Of course I wasn’t in love with her.”
If she was in love with you, and because she was just the maid, maybe she wasn’t such a slut after all, Moira thought. But she kept her thoughts to herself.
“She told me she was pregnant. That she expected me to marry her.”
“And you wouldn’t.”
“Of course I wouldn’t, are you a complete fool?” Ralph was on his feet again, pacing up and down in front of her. “I told her I’d give her some money and she could go to Toronto. Have the baby there. I said I’d talk Mother into giving her a good reference. What else did she expect?”
He actually sounded pleased with himself, looming above her, large and aggressive, outlined against the setting sun.
A few dollars and a good reference. What else could a poor young maid expect? Moira opened her mouth to scream at him, her handsome, privileged, arrogant, self-centered brother. To release all her rage at the unfairness of the world.
But she remembered him weeping only minutes ago on her shoulder and his confession that Amy haunted his dreams.
“Stop pacing, Ralph. My neck is hurting. Amy didn’t take your money or your reference, I assume. So what did she do?”
“She killed herself.”
“Oh, Ralph.” As angry as she was for his callous treatment of a woman who had so much less power and position than he, Moira’s heart melted at the cry of pure pain in his voice.
“Did you…find her?”
“Yes. I went to her room. You remember? She slept in that cabin in the woods? The one furthest from the cottage? It was late, I’d told her I was going into town and that I’d come later. I knocked on the door. She didn’t answer. I thought she fell asleep, so I walked in. She was lying on the floor, dead. Both her wrists slit from one side to the other. The back of her head was soft where she had fallen and hit her head.”
“Oh, Ralph.”
“She used a kitchen knife. A big sharp one.”
“I remember Mrs. Brooks making a fuss about missing it. But why didn’t you call the police? Or the doctor? Or at least wake up Mother?”
“Wake up Mother?” Ralph laughed. It was a harsh, bitter sound, more of a bark than a laugh. “What good would she have been? Grandma perhaps, but she was visiting Aunt Laura after her miscarriage.”
“What about me? I was there. Why didn’t you come to me? I’d seen dead bodies by then. I was qualified.”
“Oh, M. Do you think I could go to my little sister and say ‘Come and see my mistress. She killed herself because she was pregnant and I wouldn’t marry her’?”
“No. Probably not.”
The sun had disappeared and the temperature was dropping fast. Moira’s hair was still wet from her last swim and the cold pricked her scalp. The drone of an aircraft sounded high overhead. Instinctively they both looked up.
“American,” Ralph said. “A bomber. Strange for it to be all on its own. They make good pilots, Americans.”
“What did you do?”
“I got Grandfather. He wasn’t happy at being woken up, but came down with me right away. He told me we couldn’t afford the scandal. Not now, he said, with war brewing in Europe. Father had some big contracts coming up that might be threatened by a scandal.”
Moira sucked in her breath. “And you agreed with that!”
“Oh, M. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d had a lot to drink earlier that night. Of course I didn’t want Father to find out. You know what he was like.”
As straight and hard as a steel rod and just as unbending. Moira knew.
“Grandfather said that if they did an autopsy they’d find out she was pregnant. We had to get rid of her. So we buried her behind the cabin with some of her clothes and things to make it look like she ran away.”
He shuddered, whether from the cold wind blowing off the dark sea or the memory Moira didn’t know. “His dog followed us into the woods, kept scratching at the ground. Grandfather locked him in the garden shed and then I took him to Toronto. We were terrified the stupid creature would dig something up. What was that dog’s name?”
“Horatio.”
“That’s right. ‘I knew him, Horatio.’ Then we cleaned up her room.”
Moira’s mind reeled. Amy Murphy buried in the beautiful woods behind her family’s summer home. She remembered the last leave before she left for England. Walking through her beloved woods, ripe with the promise of summer. How she stopped to admire a patch of white trilliums, particularly thick and lovely that year, growing behind the vacant servant’s cottage.
She would never walk there again.
“You were foolish, Ralph. Very foolish. You treated a woman like a possession. A possession you could use and then discard. I hate you for that.” Moira rose to her feet, and placed her hands on her brother’s face, forcing his dark, tortured eyes to look at her. “But you didn’t kill her. If she chose to do away with herself, then the deed lies only with her. She was wronged, and you have to live with that. But she was weak. And you have no need to atone for her weakness.”
He smiled. It was a feeble smile, but a smile none the less.
She released him and bent to gather up the picnic things. “The ferry must have left simply ages ago and Matron will have my hide on a plate if I’m locked out. So I hope you have money in that pocket of yours.”
He laughed. “I’m sure we can find a grateful boat owner happy to transport two valiant Canadian soldiers to the mainland. Provided I offer to pay enough, of course.”
The steep stairs up the side of the cliffs numbered in the hundreds. But they were both young and fit and strong and they walked comfortably in each other’s company.
“But the cabin,” Moira said, as they approached the top. “I can’t imagine Grandfather helping you clean up the cabin. It must have been a mess.”
“Not too bad.” Ralph stepped over the rim of the cliff and reached back to help his sister up the last step. “There wasn’t much blood at all. I would have thought there would have been more.”
Not much blood.
As a student Moira had done a rotation in the psychiatric ward. She would never forget the young woman the doctors had pronounced cured and ready to return home. The morning she was to be discharged, she had barricaded herself in her private room behind a table and heavy chair and slit her wrists with a smuggled razor blade.
Once the orderlies had broken down the door, Moira was the first into her room. To this day, outside of the operating theatre, she had never seen so much blood.
Yet Amy Murphy had slit her wrists badly enough to die without leaving much blood.
Impossible.