Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel) (30 page)

“
Don’t
talk,” Max said. “Don’t say another word. Just say good-bye to me, like nothing’s wrong, and ring off. If Gabby doesn’t leave,
you
leave right away. Say you’ve gone to look for the ambulance. Call 999 once you’re safely outside and once you can’t be overheard. Make sure everyone understands poison is involved.”

“Poison!”

But Max had already rung off. Putting the vehicle in gear, he tore off as fast as the narrow, winding roads would allow.

Awena, at the other end of the satellite beam, was left staring at the mobile screen.

The mist in Max’s mind cleared some more. He searched his memory, and the many odd things he had noted began to make more sense. He felt certain he was right, but … Suddenly, he pulled off the road, raising a spray of mud.

He woke his mobile from sleep and put in a direct call to DCI Cotton. He got him on the first ring.

He filled him in, adding, “So there’s something you need to check on.”

Cotton listened, then said, “On it.”

“But first make sure Awena’s okay. Make sure they’re all okay.”

He turned on the engine and gunned it, only to find the left side of the Rover was sunk in mud up to its hubcaps. It was the kind of stuck that meant the only hope was finding a piece of wood—a tree branch, or something to create traction for the wheel. Even the four-wheel drive was going to be useless in this situation, although he did try, rocking the Rover back and forth, and quickly reaching the point of making things worse.

Meanwhile, water from the heavens continued to pour down. Max uttered a rare curse—quite a loud curse—and, pulling his jacket tightly about him, ran back to Coombebridge’s cottage.

Max and a surprisingly helpful Coombebridge got the Land Rover unstuck after about twenty minutes of trial and error and a great deal of grunting and swearing, wedging firewood and the floor mats under the front wheels for traction. Max had driven off at last at a more cautious pace, arriving in Nether Monkslip within the hour and heading first to King’s Rest—the Bottles’ house.

Where he found both Awena and Melinda gone, the house locked. He headed toward the flat over La Maison Bleue. But inside the shop, Lucie told him Gabby had left, saying she was going to Hawk Crest.

“I saw the ambulance go by,” she told him. “Gabby said Melinda had been taken ill, but Gabby was sure she’d be fine. Awena went with Melinda in the ambulance.”

“Where on the Crest?” demanded Max.

“Gabby? She is probably in Nunswood,” Lucie told him. “She likes it there, by the spring. She says it’s a sacred place, and she goes there to pray for her mother.” Lucie paused. “I didn’t like the way she looked, Father Max. But she made it clear she wanted to be alone.”

But Max was already headed out the door. Over his shoulder he said, “Her mother—she is ill perhaps?”

There was such a weighted silence, he turned to see Lucie looking at him, a puzzled expression on her face. “Her mother is long dead,” she said flatly. “She died in the war.”

*

He found Gabby sitting quietly by the spring, on one of the stones that had once been part of the ancient ring of menhirs, most of them now tumbled over in disarray. He had the idea she had indeed been praying, an idea confirmed by the desolate, unfocused look in her eyes as she turned to him. It was almost as if she were willing herself back into the present. Otherwise, she looked much the same as ever: the excellent proud posture, the immaculate white hair.

She sighed, making an evident effort to focus her attention.

“‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked,’” she quoted. It was of course a phrase from the Bible. “No pleasure left at all, in fact. Will you hear my confession, Father?”

“Of course I will.” It was a request no priest could refuse. The Rite of Reconciliation, the new name for what was commonly called Confession, was a healing ritual that was intended to return the penitent to a merciful God. To reconcile anyone who had strayed. He had been asked only a few times in his ministry to perform the rite, but on each occasion the person confessing had spoken afterward of being overcome by a sense of healing, of renewal. “Reassembled,” as one man had put it.

“Of course,” Max repeated, and he sat near her on another of the fallen stones, waiting quietly for her to begin to speak. She opened her palm and he saw that the medallion she always wore around her neck had been clutched tightly in her hand. Her flesh was red and torn where the nails had dug in. He was not surprised to see she was wearing the same earrings he’d seen in the photo of the restaurant, the earrings that had been worn by Melinda.

“Your first question, Father Max, will be: How did I come to find him?”

Max nodded. That wasn’t, in fact, his first question—as always, he wanted first to confirm his suspicions as to the “why.” But he let her tell the story in her own way.

“But perhaps you have guessed that already,” she went on. “How this all came to be. For that is the wonderful, the miraculous part of my story. Full of wonder. Now, those are words someone of your profession should understand. I found him via a pair of earrings. Earrings I’d seen in a magazine photo.” And she reached up to touch the jewelry at her ears. The jewelry that had so recently adorned Melinda.

“I was leafing through a magazine at the place where I was working, in Bradford. I had gone there with my husband, planning one last stop before we retired for good, or so I thought. We had so many plans. We would travel. Most of all, we would travel. Maybe I would write a book, perhaps about my life as a child growing up in a convent. He would paint. Harold always looked forward to having that sort of time to explore.

“And then within a few months, he was gone. The heart and soul of me was just
gone
one day. In the mornings as I sat reading the paper, trying to read, I would turn to say something to him—I would forget, you see. That was how we always started the day: I would read, and he would do the crossword puzzle. Sometimes I would read aloud to him some bit of outrage from the news.

“But then I would remember he was gone now. I had no illusion he was hovering about the room somehow, like a ghost. He just wasn’t there. It was unbearable, Father. I’m not making excuses, but pain like that, a loss like that, after a lifetime together … my friend and soul mate…”

Max nodded, remembering how he had missed Awena in much the same way during her very brief absence. The thought of its being more than a temporary separation was unbearable to him.

She swiped at a tear that trembled at the corner of her eye. “I didn’t know what else to do with myself, so I kept working. And one day, I saw the magazine. It was one of those ‘lifestyle’ publications that flourish in good times and bad—magazines that permit one at least to dream during the bad times. I came to a page with a photo showing a crowded dining room at a new restaurant in Nether Monkslip. The White Bean, of course; you know it. Several of the people in the forefront of this photo were shown from behind or in somewhat blurry profile. Then there were many more people sitting in the far distance, their features indistinguishable. In these days, when everyone worries so about invasion of their privacy, their precious privacy—surely a modern construct—no photographer would dare publish a photo too exact of such a crowd. It looked, in fact, as if the photographer had deliberately blurred certain areas of the photo. What, after all, if a man were there, sitting on a banquette with a woman not his wife?

“So all that could be seen of the woman closest to the camera was the back of her head; she had her face turned away from the camera, presumably in conversation with the man beside her.

“But what caught the eye—what caught
my
eyes anyway, and instantly—was the earring, which could be seen, quite clearly, dangling from the woman’s right ear.

“There could be no doubt, so large and distinctive was that earring. The photographer had artfully captured its golden glimmer in the candlelight, so that it stood out like a sign. A sign to me.

“As I say, distinctive they were, those earrings—one of a kind. Literally, one of a kind. I recognized the design immediately. For I had seen them before, in another photograph.

“And who would wear one earring? It had to be one of the set.

“Where had she gotten them, this woman? How had she come by them? I had to come to Nether Monkslip to find out. Of course I knew of the place already because of Lucie—another sign it was, that she was also in this photo. An unmistakable sign. I hadn’t seen her in years, but still I could tell it was Lucie sitting at that table, and even though his face was blurry, it had to be Frank beside her.

“I had to get here, and see for myself, and find out where the other woman in the photo, their dinner companion, had gotten those earrings.

“For they had been my mother’s, those earrings.

“
And they had been intended for me.

“I had to see them up close. I had to investigate. I had to
know
what happened.

“It took only moments of online detective work to find out he’d moved here, that he actually lived here, and hadn’t just been visiting on the night the photo was taken. He kept making announcements to the media about what he was going to do, that he was going to retire, so learning more about his life was easy.

“And once I knew where to find him … well. I put my plan in motion. I called Lucie, who offered me a place to stay. I encountered no difficulty in finding work in Nether Monkslip, especially with Lucie to vouch for me with Annette. All my qualifications were in order.

“I am, of course, not really Lucie’s aunt. Lucie’s mother was an orphan, raised in the same orphanage as I was. When you have no people of your own, you adopt others quickly into your life. You call them ‘cousin’ or ‘sister’ or anything that makes you feel you are a little bit a part of this world. Anything that makes you feel less alone.

“So, her mother and I were raised together by the Sisters of St. Ardelle. You could say we all raised one another. There were so many of us girls without a real home or family.”

She was silent so long, Max wasn’t sure she would speak again. Finally, he returned her to the present tale. “The earrings?” he asked.

With a visible effort, she said, “Yes, of course. The earrings.

“The thing you need to understand is this: There was no way anyone had come by them honestly. They were mine. They were intended for me alone. My first step became to find out exactly how Melinda—for it was Melinda in the photo, of course, as I readily learned from Lucie—how she’d come to possess them.

“Once I had packed up and moved and settled myself in Nether Monkslip, I set about learning all I could about the Bottles. With one salon in the village, it was perhaps only a matter of time before Melinda became my client, but I was, of course, more “proactive,” as they say, than that. I cultivated her; I earned her trust, which was not difficult—Melinda desperately needed someone to talk to.

“Even as I began gaining her confidence, I told myself I had come to grips with the past and that I was just satisfying my curiosity. That I had put aside all thoughts of revenge. But once I had confirmed to whom Melinda was married, and of course when I actually met the egomaniac, all of that vanished. On the instant, it vanished.

“A pompous little boy had grown to be a pompous, self-important, and petty little man who belittled and mistreated almost everyone who crossed his path.

“Do you believe we change, Father? Of course you do—you must believe, in your line of work. But you’d be wrong about that. We don’t. People don’t.

“Anyway, there he was. I wanted to make sure he hadn’t, by some miracle, changed—I was trying to play fair; isn’t that a joke?—but of course he was just what you’d expect of a snitch. A cowardly, pompous braggart, bullying his sad little wife. I did feel sorry for Melinda: so much younger than he, filling her days with shopping and an affair—someone to pass the lonely hours with. A bit of intrigue in an empty life of playing handmaiden to the Great Thespian.

“How do I know all this? She told me. I cultivated her; you see how I cultivated her: I needed to know her and him and their habits as a married couple.

“I learned from Melissa how Thaddeus had come to be in England: He was adopted out of France by the Bottles, when his own parents were killed in a car accident just as the war ended. Later, Thaddeus—or ‘Thaddee,’ as he was originally known—left the village and the Bottles behind for a career in London. I gather the Bottles had by this time come to realize they had taken a viper into their nest. Just as in the Aesop’s fable about the snake that was saved from freezing but bit the farmer who had saved him.

“Anyway, the rest, as Thaddeus would be the first to say, is theatrical history. Of course, most traces of accent had been sanded away with the years and the stage training, but he spoke the sort of excellent French you learn at your mother’s knee—I heard him as we all did, speaking with Lucie. Even the little dog Jean, so Melinda told me, was named for Jean Cocteau.

“Of course it was little Jean Cocteau that allowed me to go to and from the house with ease: The Bottles’ dog didn’t bark because it knew me. I went there all the time and I would slip the dog a little treat, so it got used to me.”

“Why were you there so much?” Max asked. “Surely Melinda went to your shop to have her hair done.”

She held up a forestalling hand. “I will tell you why, Father. I will tell you. I will tell you all of it.

“You could not have failed to have noticed how vain Thaddeus was about his appearance. He’d had at least two face-lifts—a hairdresser can always tell. And he dyed his hair. Of course he dyed his hair.

“Do you remember that old advertising slogan—‘Only your hairdresser knows for sure’? I was sworn to secrecy. He was so vain! He would stop by the shop for a haircut, but he’d pay me extra to go to the house on evenings when Melinda wasn’t there. It’s not unusual for people who can afford it to have these sessions in their homes, and of course Thaddeus was used to having this sort of personal treatment. So I’d go over there to the house once a month, like clockwork, to do his hair in private. If I do say it myself, I’m very good at what I do. No one could tell.