The Secret Keeper (39 page)

The door opened then and sounds of the outside world drifted through in the wake of their mother’s nurse—people laughing, buzzers sounding, phones ringing. Laurel watched as the nurse moved about the room efficiently, checking Dorothy’s pulse, her temperature, marking things down on that chart at the end of the bed. She offered Laurel and Rose a kind smile when she had finished and told them she’d hold onto their mother’s lunch in case she woke later and was hungry. Laurel thanked her and she left, closing the door behind her again and casting the room back into a still silent terminus in which to wait. Wait for what though? No wonder Dorothy wanted to go home.

‘Rose?’ said Laurel suddenly, watching as her sister straightened the clean photo frames.

‘Mm?’

‘When she asked you to get that book for her, the one with the photograph inside, was it strange to see inside her trunk?’ More to the point, was there anything else in there that might help solve Laurel’s mystery? She wondered whether there was any way to ask without tipping Rose off to her search.

‘Not really. I didn’t think much about it, to be honest. I went as quickly as I could for fear she’d follow me up the stairs if she thought I was taking too long. Thankfully she was sensible and stayed in bed where I’d put her—’ Rose gasped.

‘What? What is it?’

Rose exhaled with relief, brushing her hair from her fore-head. ‘No, it’s all right,’ she said, shaking her hand. ‘I just couldn’t for the life of me remember what I’d done with the key. She was being difficult, you see; she came over all agitated when she saw I’d found the book. She was pleased, I think—I mean, she must have been, it was she who’d wanted it in the first place—but she was snippy, too, quite irascible; you know how she can get.’

‘You’ve remembered now though?’

‘Oh yes, of course—it’s back in her bedside table.’ She shook her head at Laurel and smiled guilelessly. ‘Really, I wonder about my brain sometimes.’

Laurel smiled back. Dear, innocent Rose.

‘Sorry, Lol—you were asking me something … about the trunk?’ ‘Oh no, it was nothing. Just making conversation.’

Rose glanced at her watch then and announced that she’d have to leave to collect her granddaughter from nursery. ‘I’ll pop in later tonight, though, and I think Iris is in tomorrow morning. Between us we ought to be able to get everything packed for the move on Friday … You know, I almost feel excited.’ But then her face clouded. ‘I expect that’s a terrible thing to feel, under the circumstances.’

‘I don’t think there are any rules about such things, Rosie.’

‘No, perhaps you’re right.’ Rose leaned down to kiss Laurel’s cheek, and then she was gone, leaving behind a trail of her lavender fragrance.

It had been different with Rose in the room, another moving, bustling breathing body. Without her, Laurel was even more conscious than before of just how faded and still her mother had become. Her phone beeped with an incoming message and she leapt to check it, clutching gratefully at the lifeline to the outside world. It was a form email from the British Library, confirming the book she’d ordered would be available the following morning and reminding her to bring identification to complete her registration for a reader’s pass. Laurel read it through twice and then slid the phone reluctantly back into her bag. The message had offered a moment of welcome distraction; now she was back where she’d started, in the stultifying stasis of the hospital room.

She could stand it no longer. The doctor had said her mother would most likely sleep all afternoon due to her pain medication, but Laurel took up the photo album anyway. Sometimes the well-worn patterns and roles really were the best. She sat close to the bedside and started at the beginning, the photograph taken when Dorothy was a young woman, working for Grandma Nicolson at her seaside boarding house. She made her way through the years, recounting her family’s story, hearing the reassuring sound of her own voice, feeling vaguely that by continuing to speak in such a normal way she might somehow keep life in the room.

Finally, she reached a photograph of Gerry on his second birthday. It had been taken early, as they gathered the picnic together in the kitchen, just before they set off for the stream. Teenage Laurel—look at that fringe!—had Gerry on her hip, and Rose was tickling his tummy, making him gurgle and laugh; Iris’s pointed finger had made it into shot (angry about something, no doubt), and Ma was in the background, hand to her head as she regarded the contents of the hamper. On the table—Laurel’s heart almost stopped—she’d never noticed it there be- fore—was the knife. Right by the vase of dahlias. Re-member it, Ma, Laurel found herself thinking, pack the knife and you’ll never need to come back to the house. None of it will happen. I’ll climb down from the tree house before the man walks up the driveway and no one will be any the wiser that he came that day.

But it was childish logic. Who was to say Henry Jenkins wouldn’t have come back again if he’d found the house empty? And perhaps his next visit would have been even worse. The wrong person might have been killed.

Laurel closed the album. She’d lost the spirit for narrating the past. Instead she smoothed her mother’s sheet across her chest and said, ‘I went to see Gerry last night, Ma.’

From nowhere, as if a sound upon the wind—‘Gerry …’

Laurel glanced at her mother’s lips. They were still, but slightly parted. Her eyes were closed. ‘That’s right,’ she said more eagerly, ‘Gerry. I went to see him in Cambridge. He was so well, such a clever boy. He’s mapping the sky, did you know? Did you ever think that little boy of ours would do such incredible things? He says they’re talking about sending him to research for a time in the States, a tremendous opportunity.’

‘Opportunity …’ Ma breathed the word rather than spoke. Her lips were dry and Laurel reached for the cup of water, feeding the bendy straw gently towards her mouth.

She drank stiltedly, not a lot. Her eyes opened slightly. ‘Laurel,’ she said softly.

‘I’m here, no need to fret.’

Dorothy’s delicate eyelids quivered with the effort of staying open. ‘It seemed …’ She was breathing shallowly. ‘It seemed harmless.’ ‘What did?’

Tears had begun—not so much to fall as to seep from her eyes. The deep lines of her pale face glistened. Laurel took a tissue from the box and patted her mother’s cheeks, as gently as she would a small frightened child. ‘What seemed harmless, Ma? Tell me.’

‘It was an opportunity, Laurel. I took … I took …’

‘Took what?’ A jewel, a photograph, Henry Jenkins’s life?

Dorothy clutched Laurel’s hand tighter and opened her watery eyes as wide as she could manage. There was a new note of desperation in her voice when she continued, determination too—as if she’d been waiting a long time to say these things and despite the fierce effort it took, she was going to finish. ‘It was an opportunity, Laurel. I didn’t think it would hurt anybody, not really. I just wanted—I thought I deserved—that it was fair.’ Dorothy drew a raspy breath then that sent jitters down Laurel’s spine. Her next words spooled out like a spider’s thread: ‘Do you believe in fairness, that if we’re robbed we should be able to take something back for ourselves?’

‘I don’t know, Ma.’ Every ounce of Laurel ached to see her mother, the ancient ailing woman who’d chased away monsters and kissed away tears, racked now by guilt and contrition. She wanted desperately to offer comfort; she wanted equally to know what her mother had done. She said gently, ‘I suppose it depends on what it is that’s stolen from us, and what it is we propose to take for ourselves in return.’

The intensity of her mother’s expression dissolved and her eyes watered now at the brightness of the window. ‘I thought that it was fair,’ she said again. ‘I thought it seemed like justice.’

Later that afternoon, Laurel sat smoking in the middle of the Greenacres attic floor. The bleached boards were smooth beneath her, solid, and the last of the late afternoon sun fell through the tiny four-paned window in the roof’s peak, landing like a spotlight on her mother’s locked trunk. Laurel drew slowly on her cigarette. She’d been sitting there for half an hour now, only her ashtray, the trunk’s key and her conscience for company. The key had been easy enough to find, tucked where Rose had said it would be, right at the back of their mother’s bedside table drawer. All Laurel had to do now was slip it into the padlock, twist, and she’d know.

But know what? More about the opportunity Dorothy had glimpsed? What it was she’d taken or done?

It wasn’t that she expected to find a full written confession inside; nothing like that. Only that it seemed an important, rather obvious place to look for clues to her mother’s mystery. Surely if she and Gerry were going to tear around the country troubling other people for information that might help fill in the blanks, it was a somewhat glaring oversight not to have done what they could at home first. And really, it was no more invasive of her mother’s privacy than the digging they’d started to do elsewhere, was it? Opening the trunk was no worse than talking to Kitty Barker, or chasing Dr Rufus’s notes, or going to the library tomorrow in search of Vivien Jenkins. It just felt worse.

Laurel eyed the padlock. With her mother out of the house, she was just about able to convince herself it was no big deal—Ma had let Rose retrieve the book for her, after all, and she didn’t play favourites (except where Gerry was concerned, and they were all guilty of that): ergo, Ma wouldn’t mind Laurel seeing inside the trunk either. A tenuous logic perhaps, but it was all she had. And once Dorothy came home to Greenacres it all turned to dust. There was no way, Laurel knew, she’d be able to go through with the search with her mother just downstairs. It was now or never.

‘Sorry, Ma,’ said Laurel, ridding herself of her cigarette with a decisive squish, ‘but I have to know.’

She stood up carefully, feeling like a giantess as she went to the sloping edge of the attic. She knelt to insert the key and crack the padlock open. That was the moment; she felt it in her heart; even if she never opened the lid the crime was already committed.

Better then, surely, to be in for a pound as for a penny? Laurel stood and started to lift the old trunk’s lid; she didn’t look though. The stiff leather hinges creaked with paucity of use, and Laurel held her breath. She was a child again, breaking a rule set in stone. Her head felt light. And now the lid was open, as far as it could go. Laurel took her hand away and the hinges strained beneath its weight. Drawing in a deep breath of resolution, she crossed the Rubicon and looked inside.

There was something on top, an envelope, old and a bit yellowed, that had been addressed to Dorothy Nicolson at Greenacres Farm. The stamp was olive green and featured a young Queen Elizabeth in her coronation robes; Laurel felt a sudden quiver of memory when she saw that image of the queen, as if it were important, though how she couldn’t guess. There was no sender address, and she bit down on her lip as she opened the envelope and slipped a cream rectangular card from inside. There were two words written across its middle in black ink: ‘Thank you’. Laurel turned it over and found nothing more. She agitated the card back and forth, wondering.

There were lots of people who might’ve had reason to thank her mother over the years, but to do so in such an anonymous way—no return address, no name at the bottom of the card—was decidedly odd; the fact that Dorothy had kept it under lock and key, odder still. Evidence, Laurel realised, that her mother must have known precisely from whom it had come; further, that whatever the person was thanking Ma for was something secret.

All of which was exceedingly mysterious—sufficiently so to quicken Laurel’s heart—but not necessarily relevant to her search. (Conversely, there was every chance it was the vital clue, but Laurel couldn’t think there was any way of knowing that for sure, not at this point; not unless she asked her mother outright, and she didn’t intend to do that. Yet.) She returned the card to its envelope and slipped it down the inside edge of the trunk, where it lodged beside a little figurine made of wood; Mr Punch, Laurel realised with a half-smile, thinking of the holidays they used to have at Grandma Nicolson’s.

There was another item in the trunk, an object so large it al-most filled the whole space. It looked like a blanket, but when Laurel reached in, drew it out and shook it to full length, she saw it was a coat, a rather tatty fur that must once have been white. Laurel held it by the shoulders at arm’s length, letting it hang, sizing it up the way one might when deciding whether to purchase a jacket in a shop.

The wardrobe at the far end of the attic had a mirrored door. They used to play inside that wardrobe when they were children, at least Laurel had; the others had been too frightened, which had made it the perfect place for her to hide from them when she needed the freedom to disappear inside her made-up stories.

Laurel took the coat to the wardrobe and slipped her arms inside its sleeves. She regarded herself, turning slowly from one side to the other. The coat fell just past her knees, with buttons down the front and a belt around the middle. It was a lovely cut, no matter what you thought of fur, the attention to detail, the line. Laurel was willing to bet someone had paid a lot of money for this coat, back when it was new. She wondered if that person had been her mother, and if so, how a young girl working as a maid had afforded such a fine thing.