All Things Undying (3 page)

‘Here we go!' Janet returned, carrying a tray on which she'd arranged a teapot, two mugs, a sugar bowl and a jug of milk. Balanced on top of the milk jug was a plate of chocolate digestives, a kind of flat, round graham cracker frosted with chocolate. She set the tray carefully on the footstool in front of me. ‘Shall I be Mother?' she asked.

‘Absolutely. I'm dangerous. Whenever I pour, the top of the teapot has a tendency to fall into the cup.'

Smiling, Janet filled my mug with tea. ‘Milk?'

‘No thanks,' I replied. ‘A weird American thing, I know, but I like my tea plain. No sugar either.'

‘Black, then. Here you go.'

I accepted the steaming mug, wrapped both hands around it, and sipped carefully. ‘You wanted to show me something, Janet?'

‘Right!' Janet groped about in the space between the sofa and the wall, retrieved a basket by its handles and set it on her knees. ‘Since you're a knitter, too, I thought you'd be interested in this project I've just finished. It's knit from the wool of a sheep I met up in Somerset.' She lifted a sweater from the basket and spread it out on the sofa between us, smoothing it gently.

The sweater was an oatmeal-colored turtleneck; intricate cables snaked across the chest and down each sleeve. ‘Gorgeous!' I set my mug on a coaster on the end table, picked up a sleeve and rubbed the wool appreciatively between my fingers. ‘I love how you can feel the lanolin.'

While I fondled the material, Janet rose, crossed the carpet to the fireplace and picked a snapshot off the mantle. ‘This is Sheila. She's a North Ronaldsay.' Janet handed the photograph to me. An animal – half sheep and half shaggy dog – gazed out of the frame with dark, soulful eyes. ‘It's a fairly rare breed originally from Orkney,' she explained. ‘A friend of mine keeps a small herd on her farm near Bradford on Avon.'

I looked up from the photo. ‘This is her wool?'

Janet chuckled. ‘The sheep's, not my friend's!'

‘I'd rather be working with Sheila's wool than the synthetic crap you saw upstairs,' I said. ‘But some people are allergic to wool, poor things. Not that I'm going to be working on anything in the immediate future, anyway. Some humorless Neanderthal confiscated my knitting needles at the security checkpoint at BWI.'

‘You're joking! I thought they rescinded that rule.'

‘Maybe the agents at BWI didn't get the email. I don't suppose there's a yarn shop nearby?'

‘Sorry.' She returned the snapshot to its place on the mantle, propped up next to a framed photograph of her twins, Samantha and Victoria, age six. ‘What size needles do you need?'

‘Eleven.'

‘Eleven? For that shawl?' Her forehead creased in puzzlement.

It took me a couple of seconds to figure out what the problem was. In the States, the fatter the needle, the higher the number. In the UK, the same rule applied, but they used metric numbers. I wondered if I was asking for a needle the size of a walking stick, useful if you're knitting socks for Bigfoot, I suppose, but not much else. Fortunately, I remembered a second number that had been stamped into the steel of the knitting needles now likely resting under a ton of garbage at the bottom of some dumpster back at BWI. ‘Eight millimeters?'

‘Not a problem, then. I'm sure I have a pair around somewhere. I'll leave them in your room, shall I?'

‘Would you? That would be very kind!' I reached for one of the digestives. ‘Is Paul back yet? He went off to share a pint with two former colleagues. By my estimation, that was three pints ago.'

‘I haven't seen him, but I went to fetch the girls from their piano lesson, so he may have slipped in while I was out.' Janet sat down, picked up her mug and studied me over the top of a pair of pink plastic reading glasses, perched precariously near the tip of her nose. ‘You look worried. I'm sure he's just fine.'

I managed a smile. ‘Paul's a big boy. I let him cross the street by himself and everything now. It's just . . . well, the craziest thing just happened to me.' Setting my tea aside for a moment, I told her about my encounter with Susan Parker on Foss Street. ‘It so unnerved me that I don't even remember walking back here. I hope nobody saw me,' I added quickly. ‘I was probably reeling like a drunk.'

‘Susan Parker? I'm surprised you haven't heard of her.'

‘Really, why?'

‘She's rather famous. Even has a television show on ITV.'

‘Get out!'

Janet selected another digestive for herself and bit into it. ‘I haven't seen every broadcast, of course, too much going on around here most times, but she can be jolly amazing.' She licked a crumb from her lip. ‘Her program's called
Dead Reckoning
.'

‘She talks to the dead for a living, then.'

Janet smothered a laugh with her hand.

‘What'd I say?'

‘Sorry. It just struck me as funny.' She waggled a hand. ‘Dead. Living.'

I chuckled, too. After a moment I asked, ‘Do you really
believe
in that sort of thing, Janet?'

Janet shrugged. ‘Fake mediums are a dime a dozen. But Susan? She's the genuine article.' Before I could digest that remark, she hurried on. ‘You wouldn't know she's such a star, would you, when you see her in person?'

‘True. At first, I thought she was collecting for charity.'

Janet chuckled. ‘Susan is so down to earth. She lives on Ridge Hill Road. If you're up and out early enough, you'll meet her walking Bruce along the Embankment just like regular people.'

‘Bruce?'

‘Her dog. A border terrier.'

I'd always liked border terriers, ever since Puffy upstaged all the human actors in the movie
There's Something About Mary
. ‘Bruce? What an odd name for a dog.'

‘He's named after Bruce Springsteen,' Janet explained. ‘You know, “Born in the USA”.'

I had to laugh. Naming a dog after The Boss would never have occurred to me. ‘You sound like you know her.'

‘Sorry? Oh, yes, I do. We volunteer for the Christian Aid Lunch at St Saviour's Church. It's at noon on Tuesday, by the way, if you'd like to come. Not much of a meal, if you want to know the truth. Sandwiches, veggies, tea and cakes, that sort of thing. Only a pound, but I like to chuck in another quid or two for the cause.'

‘I'd love to,' I said. ‘Will Susan be there?'

‘I doubt it. She stopped coming a while back. Could have been her busy schedule, of course, but I know she found some of the parishioners a bit off-putting.' Lifting the teapot with one hand and securing the lid with two fingers of the other, Janet topped off my mug. ‘Susan ruffled quite a few feathers when she bought St Anthony's and converted it into flats.'

I remembered St Anthony's, a solid, Victorian-era church near the intersection of Clarence Street and College Way, not far from the river. ‘It was made redundant?'

Janet drew quote marks in the air. ‘Surplus to requirements. Available for disposal. It just about broke my heart.' She helped herself to another biscuit. ‘A pity, that, but what can you do?' She shrugged. ‘St Anthony's was down to a handful of parishioners. If they ever got double digits at a service, Christ himself would have climbed down from the cross to congratulate the vicar. A beautiful old building, really. Neo-Gothic. Forty-five hundred square feet, give or take, so Susan's architect had a lot to work with. It's four flats now.' After a moment, she added, ‘Susan surprised us, didn't she?'

‘How's that?'

‘Everyone thought she'd be taking the flat with the rose window, the one that faces east over the Dart, not that you'd get much of a view out of it, but the sunrise would be spectacular. But, no. Her flat's on the south side where the special windows are.'

The way Janet emphasized ‘special' made me wonder if said windows were endowed with supernatural powers, like the Grotto at Lourdes. I had to ask. ‘What do you mean, “special”?'

Janet leaned toward me and lowered her voice, speaking in a reverent whisper. ‘When the builders started pulling down the interior walls, they uncovered a pair of Byrne-Jones windows that somebody had covered up with plasterboard during the Second World War. A Miriam and a David, they were, smaller versions of the ones up at St Michael's and All Angels in Hertfordshire. They're part of Susan's sitting room now.'

Byrne-Jones windows? I was astonished, and said so. ‘How could anyone simply forget a Byrne-Jones window? They're classic! Trinity Church in Boston has one of his windows. The Adorations of the Magi. I've seen it, and it's glorious.'

Janet shrugged. ‘Alan claims that Byrne-Jones was hopelessly out of fashion by the 1930s. Perhaps nobody missed them.'

‘What brought Susan Parker to Dartmouth, do you know? It seems a long way out of London. I presume that's where she tapes her show.'

‘Three hours. But you'll remember that from before, Hannah. Catch the eight-fifteen out of Totnes and you're in London well before noon. People have been commuting from London to Dartmouth for at least a century of weekends.

I remembered that, too. ‘The English Riviera,' I said, quoting a popular guidebook.

Someone says ‘Dartmouth' and you think ‘sailing'. But sailors aren't the only types attracted to this splendid little corner of the world. Writers, poets, artists, and musicians have
all
found inspiration in Devon – it's that kind of place.

‘We certainly have had our share of celebrities buying holiday homes down here,' Janet continued, ticking them off on her fingers. ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Rudyard Kipling. Edmund Crispin. Daphne du Maurier.' She paused for breath. ‘No, hold on. Du Maurier lived in Cornwall, didn't she? And Agatha Christie, of course.' She caught her breath. ‘Hannah!'

She spoke my name so sharply that I sloshed tea over the rim of my mug. Was there a spider crawling up my sleeve? A rattlesnake coiled at my ankles ready to strike?

‘Sorry! Didn't mean to startle you,' she said, handing me a napkin. ‘I suddenly remembered that the National Trust opened Christie's home to the public just last month, and I know what a fan you are of mysteries, so I wanted to make sure you knew.'

‘Greenway House is on the top of
my
to-do list,' I said with a smile. ‘Cut my teeth on Nancy Drew, then graduated to Christie. Never looked back. Visiting Greenway is a kind of pilgrimage, I suppose. Not sure about Paul, though. He's more of a Grisham fan.'

‘When you go, take the ferry,' Janet suggested. ‘It's a wonderful trip. Besides, Greenway gives you a discount if you travel by green transport.'

‘We've got National Trust membership,' I told her, patting the outside pocket of my handbag where I kept the magic National Trust get-into-just-about-anything-free card.

‘No worries, then. In any case, don't miss the gardens! The rhododendrons should be glorious this time of year.'

Before Janet could take a long detour on to a botanical tangent, I asked, ‘Susan's an American, isn't she?'

Janet nodded. ‘From your American Midwest. She did a year abroad reading medieval English at one of the red bricks. University of Warwick, I believe it was.'

‘Gosh! I wonder how she got from Beowulf and Chaucer to . . . to . . .' I thought for a moment. ‘Well, from reading about dead people to talking to them.'

‘Why don't you ask her yourself?'

‘Oh, sure. What do you suggest? That I walk up to her flat and simply knock on the door?'

Janet's smile took on Cheshire Cat proportions. ‘What are you doing on Thursday evening?'

‘Recuperating, I imagine. Paul wants to take the lower ferry to Kingswear and hike to Coleton Fishacre and back.' Coleton Fishacre – the name, I learned, was a corruption of something bucolic in old French and had nothing to do with fish – was the holiday estate of the famous Sir Rupert D'Oyly Carte whose father was the impresario behind the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Built in the Roaring Twenties, my guidebook gushed, the house was an Art Deco masterpiece redolent of the Jazz Age, set in acres of glorious gardens sweeping down to the sea.

‘I'll ring her up and see if she's available for dinner.'

‘Who? Susan Parker?'

‘Of course,' Janet said, as if inviting celebrities to dinner was an everyday occurrence. ‘Anyone else you'd like me to invite?'

I thought for a moment. ‘Jon and Alison Hamilton, our friends from the college. You've met them, haven't you?'

Janet nodded. ‘Indeed. Dartmouth's a small town.' She began stacking our empty mugs on the tea tray. ‘I'll confirm with you later, then. Will you and Paul be wanting dinner in tonight?'

‘Thanks, Janet, but no. We've booked a table at the Royal Castle Hotel. When I walked by this morning, they had
moules frites
on the menu board outside. I am crazy for mussels!' I stood up, too, and waved toward the remains of our tea.

Janet raised a hand. ‘You leave the washing-up to me.'

‘You sure?' I gathered up my purchases. ‘Fingers crossed Susan will be able to come on Thursday. There are some things I'd like to ask her.'

Janet twisted the knob and held the lounge door open until I'd passed through it into the hallway. ‘She'll probably be expecting my call.'

‘Why do you say that?'

Janet winked. ‘What kind of psychic would she be if she didn't?'

THREE