The Spring Cleaning Murders (6 page)

“I had heard you’d become a member,” I agreed. “I haven’t managed the last few meetings. But I do promise to be at the one on Tuesday morning, since it’s at Vienna and Madrid Miller’s house. I’d like them to get a nice turnout.” My feeling that Miss Whitcombe wasn’t listening was confirmed when she allowed the cat to jump out of her arms and looked at me without meeting my eyes, speaking in a voice not quite as sensible as her shoes.

“I never call him Walter to his face, Mrs. Haskell. Believe me, I didn’t mean to represent that we are on those kind of terms. He’s always Brigadier Lester-Smith in our dealings, and being the gentleman he is, I know he would be mortified”—a blush mounted Miss Whitcombe’s cheeks—”completely mortified were he to think for one moment that I was creating the impression hither and yon that he and I are on first-name terms. So if you would very kindly not mention my little slip...”

“I won’t say a word,” I promised.

“Thank you, my dear.” Miss Whitcombe clasped my hand in a heartfelt way. “Rumors get started so easily, and when a man is single and as distinguished and handsome as the brigadier—well, you understand me.” Her blush was deepening by the moment. “I would hate him to think I presumed on our very brief acquaintance, or thought there was the least chance of it blossoming into ... friendship.”

“I’m sure you’re concerned unnecessarily,” I said. Her worried eyes were reflected in the oak-framed mirror on the wall, which like the rest of the furnishings looked as though it had been purchased in the hope that the hall would grow a couple of sizes in the near future. But when Clarice Whitcombe again looked at me her smile was back in place.

“The trouble with living alone is you tend to babble the moment you get the chance to talk to someone. My mother was always a chatterbox, so I’ve probably got some of that from her. Although I didn’t get much chance to practice while she and Daddy were alive. Mummy had always hated housework and cooking, so when I left school I took over running the house. But my parents might as well have been on their own desert island. They were everything to each other. Two turtledoves right till the very end.”

“They died recently?” I asked.

“Six months ago.” Miss Whitcombe stood stock-still, her hands flat at her sides. “Mummy hadn’t been feeling well and she wasn’t good with pain. One night she and Daddy took an overdose of sleeping tablets after celebrating with a candlelight supper. Much the best way out for both of them, because he couldn’t have lived without her.”

“You found them?”

“The next morning.”

“What an awful shock!”

“Oh, yes!” she said, moving her hands. “But life goes on. I felt disloyal at first—if you can understand, Mrs. Haskell—selling off the big old house and most of the furniture, but I knew if I didn’t make a new start at once, I never would. That before very long I’d be one of those eccentric old women living for her cats.”

“I’m sure you were a very good daughter,” I said lamely.

Again Clarice Whitcombe glanced towards the mirror. “Well, it wasn’t,” she continued wistfully, “as though I was much good at anything else. Not brainy or artistic like some.”

“I see you have a piano,” I had caught sight of the grand through the open sitting-room door. “Did you bring that from your parents’ home?”

“Oh, yes, my mother was a great one for banging out a tune.”

“Do you play?”

“I always wanted to...”—her cheeks were again faintly flushed—”to have. . . more time to practice. But unfortunately I haven’t been able to do so recently.” She wrapped one hand around her other wrist. “A bout of tendinitis, not all that painful, but the doctor says that any strain could make it worse.” Once more her eyes didn’t quite meet mine; but why would she lie about such a thing? “The children,” she said suddenly, “we’d better get back to them.”

“I never trust them long on their own,” I agreed, following her down the hall. “Tam in particular is such a mischief. And I would hate to find them having a sword fight with the knives and forks.”

“You’ll have something to eat? One thing I can do is cook.” Clarice Whitcombe was pushing open the dining-room door as she spoke. “There’s so much I’d like to ask you about decorating this house. As I said, I’m not artistic, but I want the place to look welcoming. And even I can tell that my furniture isn’t quite right here—" She broke off. But not because Abbey and Tam were up to tricks.

My little girl was seated at the table spooning steamed pudding and custard neatly into her mouth. Her brother was nowhere in sight, although his plate had been cleaned down to the china pattern.

“Hello, Mummy.” Abbey beamed at me. “Tam’s gone home.” She turned so that she was kneeling on her chair, waving a sticky spoon at the open French windows that led to a path along the side of the house. “It was bad of him not to tell Miss Welcome bye-bye, wasn’t it? I hope he don’t fall into the sea.” She now sounded anxious.

What I felt bordered on hysteria. How could he have just gone? He was only three.

“I should have taken them with me to answer the door.” Miss Whitcombe was clearly struggling to become a tower of strength. “I’m so sorry for keeping you talking. But it doesn’t do to go on about that, does it? You go after your little boy, Mrs. Haskell, and I’ll keep Abbey till you find him.”

She took my daughter in her arms as I raced outside, to stand like a tree swaying in the wind for a moment. Which way to go? Would Tam have cut around the back of the house, through that dark, wooded area? Or would he have taken the longer but straighter route home, along The Cliff Road? Deciding the latter course was the more probable, I somehow managed to uproot my legs, which felt as though they had been planted deep in the soil for decades.

“Tam, darling!” I called as I ran. “Can you hear me? Please answer Mummy!” Lurching around the corner of Hawthorn Lane, I experienced the conflicting emotions that every mother knows at one time or other. The vow to God that if He would but restore my son, I would smother Tam with kisses and never let him out of my arms until he was forty. Coupled with the urge to kill my own child. I was also torn between wishing I’d asked Clarice Whitcombe to phone Ben at the restaurant and being glad he was spared the panic gripping me.

It started to rain lightly, and I shivered in my thin cardigan. Thank heavens there wasn’t any thunder to drown out my voice as I continued to shout Tam’s name. A seagull answered with a wild screech that set my heart pounding, but as I blundered on down the road I fastened on the hope that somehow, miraculously, Tam was already safely home waiting for me. Please let the only thing seriously wrong be my lurid imagination!

But what if Tam had wandered too close to the cliff edge? His fall might have been broken by one of the jutting rocks. I could picture his small battered body trapped in a crevice. Even more agonizing was the thought that he might have gone tumbling straight down onto the narrow strip of pebbled beach that separated the cliffs from the sea. I was moving at what seemed like a snail’s pace along the road; but surely if Tam were ahead of me I should have caught sight of him by now. He couldn’t have left Crabapple Tree Cottage more than a few minutes before me; he wasn’t usually an enthusiastic walker. In fact, he, far more often than Abbey, demanded to be carried.

I was a hundred yards or so beyond the church and hoarse from shouting when I heard someone come up behind me—but not my son. It was Madrid Miller, who with her sister had recently moved into Tall Chimneys.

“Mrs. Haskell! I was on my way to your house to ask if your gardener would come along some time to take a look at one of the trees in our garden. It needs pruning, but I’m afraid to start lopping willy-nilly.” She was now trotting alongside me. Seemingly unaware of my preoccupation, she reminded me that she and her sister were hosting the Hearthside Guild meeting on the following Tuesday morning. And she suggested that I might like to bring Jonas along with me that day in the car, as she’d heard he was getting up in years.

I barely slowed to give her a glance. On first meeting Madrid Miller some six weeks earlier, I had thought unkindly that she resembled an aging wood nymph. Her brown hair hung almost waist-length from a middle parting, and she had watery green eyes that peered uncertainly out at the world from behind granny glasses. The free spirit was abundantly evident in her long sack-colored frock, ropes of dried rosebud necklace, and thonged sandals. I sputtered a high-pitched explanation of why I couldn’t stop to talk, the only semi-coherent words of which were Tam’s name and “lost.”

“You must be out of mind with fright.” Madrid Miller managed to keep pace with me despite her flip-flopping sandals. “Poor you! I remember being sick with worry one day when the postman left the front gate open and my darling Jessica got out on the road. She was only quite tiny at the time and the thought of her being abducted or run over or—

“But you found her?” I stopped walking, forcing myself to peer over the cliff edge.

“A neighbor saw her and brought her back.”

“That’s good!” I took a small measure of comfort in Jessica’s safe return. I needed to be reminded and wanted most desperately to believe that most often there is the sort of happy ending that leaves a mother saying years later with a roll of the eyes and a mock sigh: “How well I remember the time you scared me half to death ...”

“Yes, we were lucky that time.” Madrid Miller flapped after me as I turned away from the cliff

"That time?” Suddenly I couldn’t move; it was as though I had been visited by Doom in human guise.

“We lost our darling when she was only three.”

“Lost?”

“She died.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” Numbly I watched the rain, or it might have been tears, drip down her face.

“It’s been thirteen years.” She adjusted the granny glasses. “Yet it seems like yesterday. It was so sudden and she was so young, darling Jessica! My sister was my only comfort! Vienna was always the strong one. She tried to make me see it was God’s will. But if it was”—Madrid Miller’s face contorted and she twisted her ropes of rosebud necklace into a noose—”he must be a wicked god to let my angel die like that in childbirth.”

“Childbirth?” I was shocked into momentarily failing to focus on Tam.

“Technically, complications from.” Her hands now fell limp at her sides. “Jessica developed eclampsia—milk fever is another name for it.”

“But I thought you said she was only three!”

“So she was.”

I could only gape at her.

“She actually died on her birthday. Such a dear little doggie.”

“Jessica was a dog?”

“The dearest, sweetest, kindest little Norfolk terrier that ever blessed this earth. What breed is your boy, Mrs. Haskell?”

“He’s a boy . . . boy,” I cried, hurrying forward again. “I’m looking for my son, Miss Miller.”

“Please call me Madrid!” She flung back her hair, which seemed to stretch even longer in the rain, and panted a little, trying to keep up with me. “I must have heard wrong, I thought I heard you shouting Tam, but I suppose it was
Tom."

“His name
is
Tam. It’s short for Grantham, a family name.

“Really? I thought it would be short for Tam o’ Shanter. We once showed against a dog of that name, his
grandfather was a champion, but it hadn’t rubbed off. He was once very rude to one of the judges. Cocked his leg at him.”

My heart was back in my throat as I dodged through the iron gates of Merlin’s Court, past Freddy’s cottage, and down the drive to the house, which had never looked more like a fairy-tale castle, wreathed as it was in a rainbow so vivid Tam might have painted it. Please, please let him be safely indoors!

“If your little boy had been a dog,” Madrid said breathlessly, “you could have eased your mind about his running off and getting lost with an identification microchip inserted by your vet. It’s a simple procedure, done by injection and no more painful than the ones he would get for his usual inoculations. Perhaps they can do something similar for children. You should check into it, Mrs. Haskell.”

We had crossed the courtyard and I was now running ahead of Madrid Miller over the moat bridge. It would have been quicker to have gone in by the front door, had I brought my key. But knowing Jonas might be at the other end of the house and not hear the bell at the first ring, I was about to enter by the garden door when it opened to reveal Freddy and—joy turned me faint--Tam, about to step outside.

All was quickly explained. Freddy had been driving his motorcycle home from the restaurant when he had spotted Tam trotting along The Cliff Road and had brought him home.

“On the bike?”

“I knew better than that.” Freddy’s grin took in Madrid Miller standing at my shoulder. “You’d have had a fit, Ellie, if I’d popped him on my knee and roared on home. I left the bike inside the church gates and piggybacked Tam back here. We made good time, let me tell you.”

“I had to go pee-pee,” explained my son as I scooped him into my arms. “I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you, Mummy, at that lady’s house. Was you scared?”

“Very.” I hugged him tight. “We’re going to have to have a long talk about this after I phone Miss Whitcombe and let her know you’re home. What you did, Tam, upset her as well as Mummy.”

“I didn’t like to tell the lady about having to go pee-pee. So now can I go and watch the lions and tigers on TV with Jonas? Please!”

It wasn’t hard to imagine what Madrid Miller was thinking. Give her a nice puppy any day. She was a character, all right. And I decided that getting to know her and her sister Vienna would be interesting. In a neighborly sort of way. The beginning would be something as cosily well-intentioned as a coffee morning.

Jonas wasn’t exactly chuffed when I had suggested he come with me to the Miller sisters’ house on the morning of the Hearthside Guild meeting. He grumbled that he didn’t even know the women and didn’t we have trees enough of our own that needed tending. But I persisted, asking if he didn’t want to add a few more jewels to his heavenly crown. Words I instantly regretted when he looked thoughtful and agreed he was at that time of life when he needed to be a sight more conscientious about loving his neighbor.