Blackthorn Winter (12 page)

 

I
SAT AROUND
all day, feeling as if I should be
doing
something. A person had died, and now everything felt different—and yet everything was already feeling totally different to me anyway, since we'd only been in Blackthorn a couple of days. I'd barely recovered from jet lag. I didn't have a regular routine. Even so, everything felt disrupted.

Kate Glendenning and Duncan knocked on our door after lunch. I invited them in and they sat at the table with us, talking about Liza Pethering. The Goops had finished their soup and pushed the bowls aside to make room for their sketchpads and markers. "We're making portraits just like Liza did," Ivy announced.

"In her honor," Edmund added solemnly. "Hold still, Duncan. I'm doing you first."

"I'll do Kate," said Ivy. "Can you turn your head a little to the left, Kate?"

I didn't have much to say. I left the table and started unpacking one of the several boxes left in the corner of the sitting room. Photo albums and framed school pictures, a scrapbook the Goops had made of our vacation to Hawaii
last summer, various candleholders and votives, a clock that had been Grandad's that had stood on our living room mantel at home. I listened to the talk while I found new homes for these things now.

Mom told a funny story about when they were students in London and had gotten themselves locked out of their flat one night. "Liza was the bold one," Mom said with a little laugh. "She just took down somebody's laundry line in back of the flats and used it as a lasso—and looped it around the iron railing to the second-story balcony. Then she and Nora and I all shinnied up the wall of the building, using the rope to help us. We felt like Spiderman. It was all very exciting. When we all climbed onto the balcony, Liza untied the rope and threw it back down into the garden—covering our traces, she called it. But then we found that our balcony door was locked, too, and we were still stuck!"

"What did you do?" Ivy asked.

"What we could have done from the start," Mom admitted. "Pounded on the door and yelled for the landlord, and he woke up and let us in." She laughed. "He was fairly puzzled as to how three young women could be locked out on their balcony with the key on the
inside
of the door.

"'Let him wonder,' I remember Liza said. She said, 'It's good to have a bit of mystery in life.' And later she painted a portrait of the landlord from memory—with this wonderfully baffled look on his face, just the way he looked that night when he rescued us. She titled the painting,
Unsettled.
It was the first piece she sold when she held her first show."

Mom laughed reminiscently, and Duncan and Kate and the Goops laughed a little with her. But I was thinking about how Liza's death was providing "a bit of mystery in
life" for all of us, and it didn't feel good at all. Someone had killed her, and that someone was out there somewhere. Talk about
unsettled.

Edmund started drawing a picture of three girls stuck on a balcony. I set Grandad's clock in the center of our mantel and surrounded it with framed family photographs. There came a tapping on our door, and Ivy leaped up to open it.

Quent stood there, with Celia Glendenning at his side. "Hello," Quent said. "Celia came knocking at my door looking for her daughter, and I figured we'd find her here."

"Come in," Mom invited them warmly. She moved to the kitchen and refilled the electric teakettle.

"I was just out doing my shopping," said Celia. "And thought I'd stop by rather than ring. You've got a dentist appointment, Kate, remember. So you'll need to come along now." She looked around the cottage appraisingly. "A nice little place you have here. Rather small for a family, but sweet."

"Thank you," said Mom. "We're delighted to be able to rent it. It's perfect for us."

"Shocking news about Liza Pethering," said Celia. "Crime in Blackthorn is nearly unheard of. And
murder?
Abominable."

We all agreed it was.

"The police came round my house!" Celia announced. "And not just our local bobby, either. They'd brought in a special detective from Lower Dillingham. To interview me, can you believe it?" She wandered around the sitting room, stopping to look at the photos I'd just set out. "They'd heard I'd had a little disagreement with Liza last night. A little altercation."

"They came here, too," said Mom.

"And to me, of course," said Quent. "I think they'll be interviewing everyone who saw her last night."

"Well, I don't like it." Celia picked up my school photo from this year. It was one of my better ones, because my smile didn't look fake, and my hair wasn't frizzy.

"This is you," she said to me, as if that was news.

"Yes," I said.

She replaced the photo, then picked up another one—a picture of me with the Goops, all of us holding boogie boards on the beach on Oahu.

"You do put me in mind of someone I once knew," she said musingly. "A striking resemblance—"

"Look, Mother," said Kate. "Ivy has drawn my portrait."

Celia Glendenning turned to look. "Remarkable," she said approvingly to my sister. "You did a good job, and already display a lot more talent than that Pethering woman ever showed."

"
Mother,
" hissed Kate.

"Now, Kate, I'm not speaking ill of the dead. I'm just stating a fact." Celia looked at her watch. "Really, now, we must hurry. You'll miss your appointment." She replaced the framed photo on the mantel, giving me another piercing look before turning to the door.

Mom showed them out, but Quent stayed and had a cup of tea with us. He and Mom talked about Liza in hushed voices. Duncan invited me and the Goops to go over to his house and watch a video.

"Something funny," I said.

"No murder mysteries or anything," Edmund added, surprising me. He usually goes for blood and guts.

"Something historical," begged Ivy. "Something that happened a long time ago and isn't sad anymore."

 

O
VER THE NEXT
couple of days, everyone who had been at Quent's party the night Liza died was questioned by the police. So were all the members of the Drama Society. So were all the employees of the Emporium. So were all the neighbors who lived in The Mews—the lane where the Petherings lived. The village was buzzing over the murder of Liza Pethering. Rehearsals for
Voyage of the Jumblies
were canceled until further notice. Parents kept their children indoors. There had not been a murder in Blackthorn for more than one hundred years—and that had been a case of a pub brawl turning deadly. It turned out there was a pub connection to this murder, too; everyone was relieved when Simon Jukes ("that lager lout," Quent called him) was arrested.

"I never done nuffink!" he shouted when the police arrested him outside the Old Ship two days after Liza's death. Quent Carrington was there and reported the whole thing to us later that night. Witnesses had seen Simon at the Old Ship on the night of Quent's party, mouthing off about how much he hated Liza Pethering for sending him to prison, and how she'd better be watching her back now that he was free again.

Quent screwed up his face into a disagreeable leer. "'Sure I said that, Officers,'" he said ingratiatingly, imitating Simon Jukes talking to the police. "'I said it, but it were just
talking,
you know, it were just a joke! I didn't
mean
none of it. It were just talking!'"

We laughed, but then Quent grew serious again. "He protested his innocence, but then the police informed him
they'd found Liza Pethering's credit cards right on the Jukeses' kitchen table! The officers had stopped at the house while searching for Simon, and his brother Henry let them come in—to prove to them that Simon wasn't there."

"That berk, Henry," Simon had fumed, using the derogatory word I'd learned from Mom that meant "fool." "I never stole them cards from her! I just found them in the bushes. Found the whole wallet tossed there, I did! Just took what might be useful—and who wouldn't? Who can blame me for that, I'd like to know? Anyways, it was only about twenty quid.
Jeez.
" He scowled at the police. "You lot better not've got our Henry upset now, I hope."

"At least he cares about his brother," Mom observed.

"He does," affirmed Quent. "I guess that's something."

Simon Jukes was taken off to jail to await a hearing, and it seemed to me everybody we talked to after that was sighing with relief. A saleslady at the Emporium told me that no one liked him, anyway, and he'd always been a troublemaker, even as a child. The fisherman on the pier assured me Simon was the first person you'd suspect when your garden shed had been broken into, or your new bicycle had gone missing ... and you'd be right. Celia Glendenning, standing in line behind us at the bank, declared that Simon had always been a ruffian, and had once shot an air rifle at all her milk bottles, breaking them to bits right on the doorstep. "It was wanton mischief when he was younger," she said, "but now he's turned truly dangerous."

"You feel safer with him locked up," agreed the bank clerk.

 

T
HE DAY OF
Liza's funeral dawned warm and balmy. A soft sea breeze blew up Mill Lane and along Castle Street.
Overnight the blackthorn buds opened, and the white blossoms scented the air and decorated the village. This unexpected and totally gorgeous spring day lifted my heart as we walked over to St. Michael's Church with Quent Carrington and Duncan. It felt almost as if the weather was paying tribute to Liza Pethering.

"This weather makes me feel like I'll be able to paint again," Mom told me, and I was glad. She had not gone near her studio since we'd learned of Liza's death. "I just keep thinking of her," Mom had confided the day before when I'd asked why she was sitting at the kitchen table to sketch rather than up in her sunroom. "How we were in art school together ... and now..." Her voice trailed off.

The pews in the church were narrow and hard, despite the thin cushion on the bench. Mom whispered to me that the church had been built in the fifteenth century—which was mind-boggling to me—but people were shorter then, so I guess the pews weren't quite as uncomfortable to them. Then Quent whispered that people weren't supposed to get too comfortable, because sermons were long and they might fall asleep. If people were fidgeting on their hard seats, at least they were awake.

There were flowers all over the altar, and there was a small table in front of the altar, with a simple wooden box in the center, flanked by candles in tall silver candlesticks. Liza had been cremated, and her ashes were in that box, I knew. I felt tears prick behind my eyes at the thought of that vibrant woman reduced to ashes. Then the minister (the
vicar,
Mom whispered) started droning on about how good Liza was, and how beloved she had been, and what a driving force in the community, and a dear neighbor to many. It all seemed the sort of thing you
should
say at funerals, but
somehow it rang false to me. I looked around at the other people in the pews, and I saw a few raised eyebrows and even heard a snicker.

I realized with a shock that most of these people weren't even particularly sorry that Liza Pethering was dead. All those simmering angers had alienated Liza from her neighbors. I saw Jean and Leo Thurber sitting together in a front pew, and I remembered Leo's disdainful pronouncement at the party:
She's a disgrace.
I caught sight of veronica Pimms seated between two heavyset people who were probably her parents. I bet she hadn't wanted to come to the funeral but her parents had made her. In my memory I heard the echo of her furious statement at the Old Ship on our first night in Blackthorn:
Someone ought to kill that bitch, if you want my humble, uneducated opinion.
I heard in my mind Duncan's grandfather, Dudley Cooper's verdict:
Hanging's too good for her, if you ask me.

I felt someone looking at me and turned my head to meet the self-righteous, penetrating gaze of Mrs. Glendenning. Kate, looking shy and mopey, slumped at her side. Celia Glendenning nodded at me, and I remembered her declaration at the party:
Somebody should take a hoe to that snake—

Oliver Pethering's face was in shadow. But I noticed him checking his watch once as the vicar's solemn prayers for the dead continued. The Goops fidgeted. Only Mom and Quent Carrington seemed truly sad. Next to me, Mom was crying audibly. Sitting on her other side, Quent's face looked stricken. He patted Mom's hand a few times, and finally put his arm around her. She buried her face against his broad, jacketed shoulder.

I shivered in the cold, ancient church as the vicar led the prayers for Liza's soul.

Afterward in the church hall, the mourners (if that's what they could be called) sipped cups of tea and nibbled at biscuits and pastry puffs (from the Emporium, probably), and murmured to Oliver Pethering how sorry they were. Ivy and Edmund, unaccustomedly solemn, hovered near me. Kate Glendenning came over to us, cup of tea in hand. She looked pleased to be free of her mother for the moment. I spotted Celia on the other side of the room, seemingly deep in conversation with the vicar, but looking over his shoulder at me while she spoke. Or more likely she was keeping an eye on Kate.

"I hate death," Kate said tersely. "Isn't it just too grim for words?"

"Yes, it is," I replied. "My mom is really upset. She's known Liza a really long time. And I keep thinking of Liza's husband. What a shock for him—finding her like that."

"Poor Mr. Pethering—," began Kate, but she was cut off suddenly by Dudley Cooper, who bore down on us like a tank, Duncan trailing along behind him.

"Did I hear you say
poor
Oliver, young lady? My girl, don't waste even another second pitying that henpecked husband." Dudley Cooper had an excited gleam in his eyes as he reached us. "I'm sure he'll be dancing a jig on her grave soon as they get those ashes properly buried in the churchyard. She treated him very shabbily, I always thought. Finding fault in everything he did! And all her flirtations with other men! If the police hadn't arrested that Jukes boy, I would have thought they'd be looking very carefully at Oliver Pethering. People can take only so much, you know,
before they snap. Nobody wished the poor woman dead, of course, but I know I myself would have quite cheerfully wrung her neck on many occasions." His eyes narrowed. "The lead role in the play should have been mine by rights and she knew it."