All Things Undying Page 12

  I swallowed hard, thinking how much I’d looked forward to seeing Susan’s flat, particularly the beautiful Byrne-Jones windows Janet Brelsford had told me about. That would never happen now. ‘I’ve walked past St Anthony House,’ I told Liz Talbot, ‘but I’ve never been inside. From the outside, you’d hardly know it’d been broken up into flats.’

  ‘There are strict rules about renovating the exteriors, Hannah, but the insides? I heard of one church, St Ann’s in Warrington. They converted it to an inside climbing gym.’ She clucked her tongue in disapproval.

  ‘Shocking!’ a new voice said. It belonged to a woman seated at the adjoining table. She’d finished her lunch and had taken out her knitting, but had clearly been following our conversation.

  ‘Lilith, this is Hannah Ives, visiting from America. Hannah, Lilith Price. We’ve just been discussing poor Susan Parker.’

  I thought I’d heard Lilith’s name before, but I seemed to be suffering from noun-deficiency anemia, so I simply nodded and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, Lilith,’ and continued eating my sandwich.

  Lilith adjusted the yarn around her finger and took another stitch. ‘Very sad, but I don’t believe in any of that talking to the dead nonsense.’

  Earlier, I’d gotten such a rise out of Olivia that I thought I might try similar scare tactics on Lilith. Keeping my voice neutral, I said, ‘Some are saying that the police think Susan Parker’s death might not have been an accident. There were people who were mightily unhappy when she moved into St Anthony’s Church, for one thing.’

  Lilith had finished a row. Using her free knitting needle, she rapped the table three times, emphasizing each word. ‘Stop right there! I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, Hannah, but I won’t stand for anyone making it sound like we had picketers pacing the pavement outside St Anthony’s carrying signs with “Yankee Go Home” written all over them. Only a handful of us were left at St Anthony’s. We objected to the church being made redundant, that’s true, but once the PCC decided that selling St Anthony’s was the best course of action, and the bish made his decision, there wasn’t much any of us could do.’

  Lilith stuck the needle back into her project and began working another row. ‘Besides,’ she said, knitting furiously. ‘St Saviour’s is a wonderful church home.’

  Liz, on the other hand, seemed more inclined to play along with my darker scenario. ‘How about that woman who was furious about her husband’s memorial, Lilith?’

  Lilith squinted at her work, took out a stitch and re-knit it. ‘What woman?’

  ‘It was comical.’ Liz turned her attention to me. ‘One of the construction lorries backed into his tombstone, toppling it like a tree. A preposterous thing, if you ask me, which you aren’t, but I’ll tell you anyway. It was an obelisk, this high.’ She held a hand over her head, which I took to mean about five feet. ‘Wreaths and anchors all over, with trumpeting cherubs and suppliant angels running rampant, and a Greek cross on the top.’

  Next to me, Lilith snorted. ‘I’ll have to agree with you there. Very O.T.T. When my time comes, plant me in a plain pine box wearing one of those nametags that says, “Hello. My name was Lilith” written in felt-tipped pen.

  Remembering all the adhesive nametags I’d slapped to my chest at social functions, I had to laugh. I hadn’t figured Lilith for a sense of humor. ‘So, what happened with the tombstone?’ I asked Liz.

  ‘The woman threw a wobbly, threatened to take legal action, so the contractor agreed to move the monument to her garden. She had them set it in place next to the tombstone of her dog, Rex, and she’s planted flowers all around. Her husband’s body is still in the graveyard at St Andrews, of course, so I don’t know what the point of that exercise was.’

  I think I knew. ‘After the funeral is over, don’t we all need a physical place where we can go to mourn?’ I thought about Cathy Yates, trying to locate her father’s body so she could fill not only the empty plot waiting for him back home in Pittsburgh, but the hole in her heart. And what of the Embankment where mourners continued to build a floral tribute to Susan Parker at the very spot where the medium had breathed her last?

  Lilith looked up from her knitting. ‘I agree completely, Hannah. And in this electronic age, that place can even be an online memorial page on Facebook.’

  ‘Don’t I know!’ I said. ‘I came completely unglued when I got an email from a friend who had recently passed away. It was sent by her daughter, as it happened, but it gave me quite a turn when my friend’s name popped up on the “From” line in my mailbox.’

  Lilith inclined her head toward mine. ‘Answering machine greetings are the worst, you know.’ She shuddered. ‘They forget to change them, so you get a voice from beyond the grave.’

  ‘Well, on that cheerful note, I have to be off!’ Liz fished around under the table for her handbag, then stood up. ‘Nice to meet you, Hannah. Will you be here next Tuesday?’

  ‘I’ll walk out with you,’ I said, picking up my own handbag.

  When we got to the bottom of the steps, however, I revised my plan. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Liz, but I think I’ll stay a while and say a little prayer for Susan Parker. Until next week, then?’

  I saw Liz out the door, picked up a Book of Common Prayer from the bookshelf, then made my way down the south aisle to the beautiful little Lady Chapel. I sat down in one of the blue-cushioned chairs, opened the prayer book to the section on the burial of the dead, and read: I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

  Life after death; Susan’s stock in trade. Was what she did for a living so incompatible with Christianity? I didn’t think so. With the book laying open in my hands, I closed my eyes and prayed for Susan’s soul, and that whoever was responsible for her death would be brought to justice.

  When I opened my eyes again, I noticed a Sacrament lamp – a perpetual candle in a brass holder hanging from a chain attached to the wall. I stared at the lamp, opening my mind, embracing the silence, hoping – but not really believing – that Susan might actually reach out from the beyond and speak to me. But my only answer was the volunteers’ happy chatter spilling down from the gallery as they did the washing-up after the lunch.

  I took the long way round on my way out of St Saviour’s, passing through the Ambulatory – past the antique hand pump fire engine and the Armada chest – through to the Chancel where I found myself standing, quite literally, on the splendid Hawley Brass.

  Dressed in a full suit of armor, John Hawley the Second lay tall and ramrod straight between his two wives, looking none too happy about it. Each lady was adorned with jewels in her hair, and was accompanied in the afterlife by a pair of toy dogs wearing bells on their collars. But John, I noticed, was holding Joanna, the first wife’s, hand. It was a good thing that Alicia, wife number two, had predeceased old John, or she might have had a thing or two to say about that.

  Meanwhile, back in the twenty-first century, I thought about Jon Hamilton and his two wives, my friend Alison and Wife Number One, who had perished at sea.

  How was it, I wondered, that in all the years that we’d known Alison and Jon, the subject of Wife Number One had never come up? We still wouldn’t have known about her if Susan Parker hadn’t picked up vibes about an earlier marriage at Janet’s dinner.

  Clearly, I didn’t know Alison as well as I thought. Over the years, we’d exchanged frequent emails, annual Christmas cards. Alison emailed my daughter, Emily – who called her Auntie A – and remembered to send cards on my grandchildren’s birthdays. How could a relationship be so one-sided? Now I even found myself wondering if their daughter, Kitty, was Alison’s, or Jon’s by his previous marriage to . . . who was it? . . . Beth?

  Alison and I were friends, weren’t we? I figured I’d just pop over to her house and see how she was doing. And while I was there, I’d simply ask her to tell me about Beth.

  But before
I did that, I decided to pay a visit to the Dartmouth Public Library.

  TWELVE

  ‘It has long been said that once a year the River Dart demands a human life and when it is ready for “a heart” it will “cry out” and summon its victim. The sound of the river can usually be heard near the “broad stone” or brad stones. An old saying goes: “Dart, Dart, cruel Dart, every year thou claimst a heart.”’

  www.Legendarydartmoor.co.uk

  The Dartmouth Public Library occupies the ground floor of the Flavel Arts Centre, a modern, tastefully designed building with a dramatic zig-zag roof over a glass façade that exposes each of its three floors to public view, like a doll house. I had to pass by the police station to get there, and as usual, I looked in. Although the station was open, the young officer manning the counter would tell me nothing about their progress on Susan Parker’s case except to say that the investigation was ongoing.

  Damn, I thought, as I crossed the street and headed for the library. I’d learned more than that from the woman reading the news on television that morning. Forensic analysis was being done of the victim’s clothing, the reporter had told the viewing public over their Weetabix, toast and orange marmalade. Furthermore, an accident reconstruction expert had been called in from Croydon, and his report was expected shortly.

  As I waited for assistance at the library reference desk, I began to case the joint. I was surrounded by shelves crammed with books, magazines, DVDs, and other material, so closely spaced that the effect was almost claustrophobic. If e-books didn’t become all the rage, I figured it wouldn’t be long before the library ran out of shelf space. Nearby, a rank of computers was provided for public use. I’d come at a good time, apparently, as only one of the machines was occupied.

  A librarian materialized from somewhere in the stacks and greeted me with a friendly, ‘May I help you?’

  I explained that I was looking for old newspaper reports.

  ‘I suggest you start with Newsbank,’ the librarian said. ‘That’s our most comprehensive resource, and it’s online.’ She pointed to a terminal. ‘Click online resources and you’ll find Newsbank among those listed.’

  I sat down and followed her instructions.

  Newsbank came up immediately, filling the screen with a multicolored map of the UK. Because I wanted to see newspapers in the South West, I clicked on the turquoise section of the map. Of twenty-two newspapers in that general region, almost all had come online in 2007.

  Rats.

  Surprisingly, the Dartmouth Chronicle wasn’t listed at all, and of the others, the one of most likely interest, the Western Morning News out of Plymouth, went back only as far as 1999. I figured Beth Hamilton had gone missing around 1994, so that was no help at all.

  ‘I guess I should have been more specific,’ I told the librarian when she reappeared at my elbow to ask how I was getting on. ‘The articles I need would have come out in 1994 or 1995.’

  A few minutes later, I found myself seated at a microfilm machine, having flashbacks to my college days at Oberlin as I reeled my way through newspapers on film, starting with the paper closest to home, the Dartmouth Chronicle.

  Elizabeth and Jon Hamilton had been avid sailors, that I knew, but finding numerous references to sailing races in which they had participated brought that fact into sharp focus. Jon’s Contessa 32 was a sprightly little craft, I realized as I scanned the results of race after race. When she wasn’t winning outright, Biding Thyme was consistently placed in the top three. No wonder Jon was loathe to part with her.

  Halfway through the Dartmouth Chronicle for 1994, I found what I was looking for: ‘Local Woman Presumed Drowned in Solo Sailing Accident’. When I noticed the date on the article, all the breath left my body.

  July 30. The date of Janet’s dinner party, when Susan Parker had been guest of honor. No wonder Beth’s spirit had been sending out vibes that evening. No wonder Jon had freaked.

  Beth had been seen by several people, the newspaper reported, sailing out of the marina alone. Several hours later, Biding Thyme had been discovered, sails still set, at Stumpy Steps not far from the Castle. There was nothing in the article that I didn’t know already, except that Jon and his daughter had been away at the time, visiting his mother in Exeter.

  I paged forward to the following week’s Chronicle to find, as expected, that police were still searching for Beth’s body. The shore on both sides of the Dart had been thoroughly combed by police and volunteers, I learned, but to no avail. A tiny spot of blood that proved, upon analysis, to have come from Beth, had been found on the stern of Biding Thyme, but there was no way to tell how the blood had got there, or when. ‘There is no evidence of foul play,’ a police spokesman said.

  The week after that, the Chronicle reported, an expert on wind and water current patterns had been called in from Oxford University. Cardiff University in Wales sent the top tide man from their Hydro-Environmental Research Center. When the two experts put their heads together, they produced a series of graphs and hydrographic charts with circles and arrows, and the joint opinion that Beth’s body had floated out to sea.

  The week after that, nothing. Ditto the week after that.

  As far as the Dartmouth Chronicle was concerned, Beth Hamilton had vanished off the face of the earth.

  I sat back and gnawed on my thumbnail. The way I saw it, there were four possible explanations for Beth’s disappearance:

  Beth had tumbled overboard and drowned. An accident.

  She’d jumped overboard and drowned. A suicide.

  She’d been boarded, clobbered, and thrown overboard. Murder.

  She went sailing, leaped overboard, swam to shore and disappeared. A runaway.

  ‘Beth is a strong swimmer,’ Jon had been quoted as saying. Is, I noticed, and not was. But what could she have been running away from? A bad marriage? From what Alison had told me, their marriage had been perfect, so there was little likelihood of that.

  If not running from something, was there anything she’d been running to? A lover, perhaps?

  I wanted to slap myself for thinking such vulgar thoughts, but the idea must have occurred to the police, too. Two weeks after she went missing, the Chronicle had published a picture of Beth with the caption, ‘Have you seen this woman?’

  Only four explanations for Beth’s disappearance. I rubbed my tired eyes and went over them again in my head. Accident, suicide, murder or AWOL. No, wait a minute. Five. Beth could have been abducted by aliens.

  Maybe I needed a break.

  As I was returning the microfilm reels to the reference desk, I remembered something Janet Brelsford had said the night of the party: each year the Dart takes a heart.

  Back at the computer, with Newsbank on the screen, I put my fingers on the keyboard and typed in ‘Dart’ and ‘Drowning,’ then scanned the search results covering the past ten years. One death a year was about right. A tourist falls off a luxury yacht; a widow drowns near her favorite spot; a canoeist is trapped under his overturned canoe; a drunken youth tumbles off the Embankment. In most cases, the body of the victim had been recovered in a few days. In one case, rescue teams used an Air Force search and rescue helicopter equipped with thermal imaging cameras to help find the body.

  Alas, no such technology had been called into play when Beth Hamilton went missing. Gradually, everybody seemed to forget about poor Beth, except for Jon Hamilton and his daughter, Kitty, age six.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘An elderly driver caused a spectacle when his vehicle crashed into an opticians. The man, aged 89, had only just started his automatic car when it ploughed into the front of Sussex Eyecare in Broad Street, Seaford. Daeron McGee, the owner of the opticians, said: “I was round the corner . . . and came back to see a car in my front window. The driver seems to be OK . . . He said he had a dizzy turn and hit the accelerator instead of the brake. Thankfully there was nobody in his way but I’ve got an entire range of Oakleys and Ray Bans which have been demolished.”’

&n
bsp; ‘Elderly Driver Creates Spectacle At Seaford Opticians’, Brighton News, 27 June 2009

  Wednesday morning dawned dark and drear, with rain drizzling from a leaden sky. An earlier phone call to Alison had produced nothing but an invitation to leave a message on her call minder, so after a quick breakfast, I zipped myself up in a slicker, grabbed an umbrella and headed up Waterpool Road to her house.

  The way Alison had been carrying on the previous day, I expected to find the shades drawn, a black wreath on the door, and have my knock answered by a lugubrious butler droning, ‘I’m sorry, Madam, but Madam is indisposed.’

  Imagine my surprise, then, when Alison herself opened the door almost immediately, dressed in neat jeans and an Aran pullover, hair brushed until it shone, and make-up so expertly applied that it hardly showed. She held an open lipstick in her hand; I’d apparently interrupted her in the act of applying it while peering into the mirror in the tiny foyer.

  ‘Come in, Hannah! Good to see you.’ She stepped aside so I could get out of the rain. ‘I’m just heading out, I’m afraid. Dad called this morning all at sixes and sevens. He’s got some Hooray Henries coming all the way from Manchester for a viewing, and the house is a tip.’ She opened a handbag that lay on the table under the mirror and tossed her lipstick in. ‘But then, what else is new?’

  ‘I just stopped by to see how you’re doing. I called first, but got the machine.’

  ‘Sorry! I unplugged the phone yesterday and forgot to plug it back in.’ She reached for a raincoat that hung on a hook behind the door. ‘Almost wish I hadn’t. Dad’s call came in so fast after I plugged it back in that he must have had me on speed dial.’

  ‘Want company?’

  ‘That would be super!’

  Three pairs of boots were lined up along the wall under the coat rack. Alison reached down and handed me a bright green pair. ‘You’ll need some wellies,’ she said. ‘It’s been raining since midnight and the lane is going to be a mucky mess.’