Todd glanced up the hill. A mile and a half wasn't far. He could easily walk there and back in an afternoon.
"You can borrow a pushbike if you like. My grandson's should be in the shed behind the house. But do have a drink before you go."
Todd rubbed his sweaty hair and agreed to a drink, although he couldn't wait to get started.
Chapter Thirteen
The nursing home was a modern building within landscaped gardens set back from the road on the edge of Tregarrow village.
Todd leaned his borrowed bike against a wall inside the gate and walked up the short drive to the front door. Immaculate lawns surrounded the building, while flower borders planted with annuals edged the drive and the paths crossing the grounds. Pretty as the colorful snapdragons, salvia, and zinnia were, the garden had no heart. Like the modern building, the garden felt artificial in comparison to the weathered stone cottages nestled within their overgrown gardens nearby.
Glass entrance doors swished open when Todd approached. A young woman, hardly older than him, smiled as he approached the reception desk.
"Can I help you?" Heat tingled in Todd's cheeks as her gaze travelled over him with interest.
He rubbed his sweaty face on his t-shirt sleeve, wishing he'd done it before he came inside. "Yes, please. I wanted to see Mrs. Keller."
"Are you a relative?"
He thought about saying yes in case they only let relatives visit, but he didn't know anything about Mrs. Keller. If they questioned him, he'd be thrown out. "Not really."
"Not really," she repeated in a teasing voice. "So do I tick the 'yes' box or the 'no' box?"
"The 'no' box."
"Well that's a pity. I was hoping you'd be a
yes
," she said in a slightly breathy voice. Todd had the feeling she wasn't talking about Mrs. Keller any more.
An older woman in a nurse's uniform bustled down the corridor and reached across the reception counter to retrieve a file.
She glanced at Todd. "Visitor?" she asked, raising her eyebrows at the receptionist.
"For Mrs. Keller," she answered.
"Have you signed him in?"
The receptionist quickly took his name.
"Come with me." The older woman beckoned him to follow, then led him down a wide corridor that smelled of disinfectant and urine beneath the fake flowery scent of air freshener. She stopped at room number twenty-two and knocked once before poking her head around the door. "Visitor, Sheila." She pushed the door wide and motioned Todd inside. "Here you are, young man. Have fun."
On the ride over, Todd had thought of all the questions he wanted to ask. He had also wondered how he'd get in. What he hadn't considered was Mrs. Keller herself. Standing in the doorway with the nurse watching him, it suddenly hit him what he was doing. He'd never been inside a nursing home before, nor did he know any really old people.
"Come in. Come in." A lady who didn't look much older than Grandpa sat in a wing chair by an open French window, overlooking the garden. She flapped a hand at him to beckon him inside. When he took a step forward, the door closed behind him.
"You don't look old enough to be in a place like this," he said.
"You dear boy, that's the nicest thing anyone's said to me in a long time." She held up her hands. Both of them resembled gnarled old tree branches. "I can't do for myself any longer with these stupid old claws. Arthritis put me in here, I'm afraid."
She pointed at a second chair. "Sit down. To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit from such a handsome young man?"
Todd cringed with embarrassment but tried not to show it. "Edna Brown told me about you."
"Edna." Mrs. Keller's gaze lost focus. "I haven't heard that name in a while. How is the old biddy?"
"Okay."
"Are you her grandson?"
"No. I do some gardening for her."
"Do you now." Mrs. Keller sat back and studied him for a moment. "My goodness gracious, I thought I recognized you. You can't be Richard Hunter so you must be his boy."
Todd nodded.
"It sounds as though history's repeating itself." Mrs. Keller stared at him thoughtfully. "Are you sweet on Marigold Turpin?"
Clenching his jaw, Todd shrugged. Why was everyone so interested in his private life?
"Good Lord! History is repeating itself." She looked him over. "Go carefully. Your dad got his fingers burned by Ruby. I'd hate you to suffer the same fate with her daughter."
"What happened? Grandpa told me Dad and Ruby were engaged. Then they broke up and he left."
"Pat Bishop saw to that." Mrs. Keller tutted. "My Liz and Pat were like this." She attempted to link her little fingers to show how close the girls had been but gave up with a sigh of disgust. "I liked Pat well enough, but she had her sights set on your dad and she wouldn't give up. I heard something happened in the woods between Pat and Richard. After that, Ruby never spoke to him again."
Todd shrank back in his seat.
Dad and Mrs. Bishop?
"You never told me why you came to visit me," she said.
"Did you hear about the boy who died in Porthallow?"
"Terrible goings-on. A young lad like that dying. I remember Andrew Bishop well. Poor scraggly little ragamuffin, he was. Never thought he'd amount to much. You know the story, don't you?"
Todd kept quiet and listened while she chatted away about Mr. and Mrs. Bishop's trouble having a baby. Once he got her on a subject, she seemed to pick up speed like a bike rolling down a hill. He winced at some of the details about infertility treatment. But he kept listening, hoping she would say something interesting. In the end she did.
"So they had to adopt. Pat wanted a girl, but her husband had his heart set on a boy. He prevailed, so they ended up with Andrew. Pat never saw eye to eye with the child from the day he crossed the threshold. If there's such a thing as chemistry, those two did
not
have it."
Andrew had been adopted as well? Nothing surprised Todd anymore. If he didn't resemble his dad so closely, he might wonder if he was adopted. He had nothing in common with Mum.
"Now your dad, he's another one who was adopted. John just turned up with Richard one day. The talk at the time was that Professor Cardell had something to do with it, that he knew your dad's real parents. Although when the Bishops wanted to adopt, he didn't help his own daughter find a child. It took them over a year to jump through all the regulatory hoops before they got Andrew."
She said a lot about how Dad and Grandpa used to argue, or, more precisely, how Grandpa used to shout while Dad listened. "Richard used to spend a lot of time at Professor Cardell's house when he was young. John often went up there too."
At the mention of Mrs. Bishop's father, Todd's ears pricked up. "Did Dad have lessons with Professor Cardell? Marigold said he teaches her."
Mrs. Keller tapped her chin with a crooked finger. "I'm not sure. Something happened when Richard was about your age and he stopped going to Trewartha House. I remember talk that he'd fallen out with Professor Cardell because of Pat, but I can't remember the details."
Professor Cardell shot to the top of Todd's list of people to question. Not only was he Andrew's grandpa, he had known Dad and possibly Dad's real parents.
When Mrs. Keller started waffling on about how Professor Cardell had disapproved of Mr. Bishop and tried to ban him from seeing Pat, Todd took the opportunity to direct the conversation to a similar topic. "Do you know anything about Mrs. Bishop's current boyfriend, Kelvin?"
"Is that what the latest one's called? Pat went through men like wildfire once your dad left."
The mention of fire reminded Todd of the Cochrans. "Grandpa's farm burned down after he sold it—"
"Oh, my goodness, those poor Cochrans!" Mrs. Keller pressed her hands together as though she was praying. "Such a tragedy. All three of the young ones trapped in the old farmhouse with no way out. The whisper was that someone had barred the door, but I never heard anything said about it officially. Such a nasty carry on. I think the police even questioned your grandpa on account of the dispute he had with them."
Todd jolted upright in his seat. "Dispute?"
"Yes. When old man Cochran bought John's farm for his sons, it was on the strict understanding that they never damage the ancient woodland on the hill above the village. Lords Wood might be protected by law, but once the trees are felled, there's not much the authorities can do to put them back.
"Those Cochran lads took no notice and were all set to clear the western side of the hill. Many in the village said it was a strange coincidence that just before they set ax to timber, the fire took them. Even the police thought it was suspicious, but they couldn't prove foul play."
"Grandpa," Todd whispered to himself, feeling a little light-headed with shock. He'd had suspicions about Grandpa, but he'd never seriously believed his grandpa would hurt anyone. Icy claws scraped down his spine. What if his own grandfather was a murderer?
"Those poor boys and that dear little girl are buried just down the road." Mrs. Keller pointed out her window to a church steeple above the trees.
The girl had been Marigold's friend. Could Grandpa have killed Marigold's friend by trapping her in a burning house? This whole investigation seemed to be spiraling out of control and getting really scary. Todd half wished he'd never started digging into Andrew's death. He scrubbed his hands over his face and got to his feet. He needed to go outside and be alone to think. "Thank you for talking to me, Mrs. Keller."
"Shaken you up, son, have I? I'm sorry about that." She patted him awkwardly on the arm. "Take care now. There's more going on in Porthallow than meets the eye."
Todd left via the French doors and cut directly across the lawn to the entrance gate and his borrowed bike. When he reached the shade of the wall, he dropped to his haunches in the long grass and put his head in his hands. This wasn't going according to plan. The only person who didn't seem to be a suspect in Andrew's murder was Kelvin.
He still couldn't get his head around the fact his grandpa might have been involved in the fire that killed the Cochrans. And all because of Lords Wood. Everything seemed to lead back to the damned wood.
When the sun hung low in the sky, Todd roused himself and mounted the bike to head home. He didn't want to be late because then Grandpa would ask questions, and he wasn't ready to explain where he'd been this afternoon.
He let the bike race down a hill between mossy walls and drooping trees. On the outskirts of the village, he caught sight of the church on his right. The church itself sat about a hundred feet back and was surrounded by the graveyard.
Todd felt almost too disillusioned and weary to stop. He just wanted to get home, get into bed, go to sleep, and forget. But he couldn't miss this opportunity to check out the Cochrans' graves, just in case he could learn anything from them.
He propped the bike against the church wall before entering the churchyard through a creaky wooden gate. The churchyard covered at least two acres. He scratched his head, looking around for the newest headstones. The stones close to the church were so decayed by time and the elements that he couldn't read the inscriptions.
Squatting beside a toppled slab of granite, he scraped away a layer of moss and lichen and made out the date 1327. He stood slowly, surveying the ground, trying to get his head around the fact that the people buried beneath his feet had lived in this village nearly seven hundred years ago. If Lords Wood was as old as he'd been told, these people might have walked between the twisted oak trees and touched the standing stones that he had touched. They might have worshiped the Wild Lord.
As he crouched among the ancient graves, the noisy silence of the countryside deepened around him, the living beat of hundreds of birds and mammals, thousands of insects, millions of plants. A strange awareness tugged at his senses so subtly he might have missed it if he hadn't been concentrating. He raised his eyes to the ancient weathered stone wall of the church. A centuries-old carving of a Green Man looked down on him through a tangle of ivy. He remembered reading how the early Christians had brought the pagan gods into churches to tempt the local people to convert to Christianity. He was starting to doubt the strategy had worked in this area.
Todd followed a crooked path between the old graves. As he walked farther from the church, the headstones were newer and the layout more neatly ordered. He discovered that the graves were arranged in date order.