Lost Among the Living (25 page)

I
came into the library rehearsing what I would say in my head, but Dottie spoke before I had the chance. “You needn't say it, Manders,” she said. “I already know.”

I should have known she'd anticipate me. “I just need today off, Dottie, and then tomorrow—”

“Don't be a fool,” she said. She had circled behind her desk and was sorting through her papers. “I certainly don't intend to be. You're resigning.”

“I didn't think I was,” I said.

“Didn't you?” Dottie found her cigarette holder beneath her papers—her desk was uncharacteristically messy—and opened her silver cigarette case. “Then I don't think you've been paying attention to what's happened the past few days. Your husband has come home. Your resigning was only a matter of time.”

I pulled up the chair at my typewriter desk and sat. “Dottie,” I said, “you don't need a paid companion. I'm not sure you ever have.”

She screwed a cigarette into the holder and looked at me shrewdly. “I have a wedding to plan,” she said again. “The engagement party was a success, despite my nephew's terrible sense of timing. But the wedding will be something else entirely. It's going to be the event of the season, and I want it to happen before Christmas. Perhaps I don't need a paid companion, but an assistant would have been useful.”

“Then I'll help you,” I said, surprising myself even as the words
left my lips, “but I won't work for you. I won't take your money for it. How does that sound?”

The chair behind her desk creaked as she briskly dropped into it. She lit her cigarette and leaned back, regarding me. “You're being rather charitable,” she said, her voice gruff with some emotion I could not read. “I know there's something that's bothering you besides Alex's return. You're a terrible liar, Manders. Just tell me.”

I swallowed. Of course Dottie would know—she could always see through me. I couldn't tell her about someone pushing Frances from the roof, or the man in the woods, or the trip to Torbram, not yet. Not until there was something concrete to tell. But I owed her something. “It's Frances,” I said.

Her face sagged for a brief moment, but then she snapped to again. “I told you I don't wish to speak of Frances.”

“You think I don't understand her, what you went through, what she suffered. But I do.”

“Is that what you think?” Dottie said. “It is not as easy as that. There is no maudlin connection between you and me because of your mother. The cases were entirely different. The fact that you lived those years with your mother does not mean you understand.”

I watched her prop the cigarette into its ashtray, her movements deliberate. I realized she was shaken. “It isn't just that,” I said. “I understand Frances because I've seen her. Here in the house. In the woods. Her dog, Princer . . . I've seen them both. She wears a gray dress and a string of pearls.”

“Is that so?” Her voice was brittle. “You think you've seen my daughter's ghost?”

“I have seen it,” I said.

“Well.” She was reflective for a long moment, her gaze far away. “You know, part of me thought—I thought she might . . .” She shook her head. “She saw the dead so many times. After she died, I started to wonder—it's why I couldn't come back to the house until now. How long have you been seeing her?”

“Since the first day,” I said. “Though not constantly.”

“I gave her those pearls for her birthday,” Dottie said. “I buried her in them. Where is she? Where in the house?”

“She appeared in the small parlor,” I said. “As clear as you're sitting before me right now.”

“I see. Does she look . . . ?” She could not finish the words.

“She looks the same as I'm sure she did that last day.”

That gave her pain, but she swallowed it. “Does she ask for me? I'm her mother. I would know—I would be able to tell what it is she wants.”

She was murdered. Your daughter was murdered, and you're one of the few people who could have done it.
But I only shook my head. “She doesn't speak.”

“I see.” She seemed to regain herself, piece by piece. “Well, it's something, I suppose, as mad as it sounds.” She glanced at me. “Go find Alex, and do whatever it is the two of you aren't telling me about. We'll discuss the rest of it tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” I said to her. “You've been very good to me.”

“Manders, go away.”

I did, but as I left the room, I couldn't help the feeling that it was for the last time. I glanced around at the desk, the shelves of unread books, my little desk with the typewriter under its cover. Whatever came next, my days as a paid companion were over.

•   •   •

“I
don't like the way she talks to you,” Alex said when we were on the road to Anningley. He had his own motorcar—on loan from the British government, I assumed—and he was driving as I rode in the passenger seat. “Aunt Dottie. She keeps calling you Manders.”

I was watching the landscape, the leaves blowing from the trees in the chill wind that was rising from the sea. “It's a habit,” I said.

“I'll speak to her about it.”

“There's no need. I'm used to it.” I leaned back in the comfortable
seat. The motorcar was nice, the seats rich leather. “I rather like it, in fact.”

“Are you going to tell me what the hell Mabry was doing at the house this morning?”

I glanced at him. His gaze was on the road before him, his jaw set in an angry line. “I told you he pretended to be interested in Dottie's art. Today he pretended he wanted to look at paintings in order to talk to me.”

The idea quietly enraged him, I could tell, from that tired anger he had begun to show. “To you alone? What about?” he said.

“He wanted me to encourage you to go work for him again and fight communism.”

Alex swore. “That's a fine decision for the two of you to make. What did you tell him?”

“I told him to go away and leave us alone.” I watched him for a moment. “Do you want to go fight communism?”

“I don't see how I could,” Alex replied. “I know just enough Russian to ask the way to the loo.” He paused. “But to answer the question, what I want is to be my own man. I don't even know if that's possible, or for how long, but that's what I want. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” I said, miserable. “If you'd rather go fight communism in order to be happy, please just tell me first, won't you? Please don't disappear again.”

He glanced at me, then back at the road before him. “I don't think you've been listening.”

“I had to say it. What will you do, then? Have you thought about it?”

“A little. I have some contacts in government, and I believe I could get a decent sort of job. Would you mind moving back to London?”

For the first time it truly sank in that he was home, that we were going to build a life together again. “London would be fine,” I said. I hadn't wanted to go back there without him, but with him, I could manage.

“Then I'll see what I can do. What arrangements were made for your mother?”

We talked of practical matters the rest of the way—my mother's burial, my letting go of the Chalcot Road apartment, Mother's final hospital bills. Alex had always been good at solving problems, and two years in RAF airplanes and three years in a double life as Hans Faber hadn't changed that. In this strange, unreal world I could not have imagined three days ago, we tentatively began to speak of our future. But as I looked out the windshield at the foggy road before us, I couldn't see very far.

•   •   •

P
etra Jennings lived in a small, tidy cottage on the outskirts of Anningley. The garden was well kept, the walk clear of leaves, the windows scrubbed clean. When Alex knocked on the front door, a woman of about thirty appeared, wearing an everyday housedress, her long thin blond hair woven into a braid down her back. From the house behind her came a damp, soapy smell, steaming the air.

“We're sorry to bother you, Miss Jennings,” Alex said to her, removing his hat. “I believe you recognize me?”

From the expression on her face—vague panic laced with unhappiness—she did. “Yes, sir,” she said, never taking her eyes from him to
look at me. “You're Mrs. Forsyth's nephew. I saw you last on the day Miss Frances died.”

“That's right. Alex Manders,” said Alex. I could tell he recognized her as well. “This is my wife, Jo. I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you can spare the time.”

Petra Jennings stood for a moment, plainly torn. Mrs. Baines had said she never spoke about the family—but Alex
was
the family. Besides, I could tell she was busy doing some kind of washing. But she finally stood back and swung the door open. “If you please,” she said, not kindly.

We stepped inside and found the inner rooms as neat and tidy as the outside, though the steamy smell was pervasive. “I'm sorry,” Miss Jennings said, leading us down the corridor past a cozily furnished sitting room. “I'll have to talk to you in the kitchen. I take in washing for a living, and I have the iron on.”

The kitchen was piled with clean clothes—shirts, trousers, dresses, shirtwaists, underthings. An ironing board was set up at one end of the room, and a steam iron was resting on it. We took a seat, and Petra Jennings promptly turned her back to us and went back to work.

“You worked for my aunt and her family for a time,” Alex said.

Miss Jennings's narrow shoulder blades worked busily beneath the fabric of her day dress. “A year or so, yes. I never talk about the family, if that's what you're asking. I'm the type to keep to myself. I don't know where all the awful rumors come from, but it isn't from me.”

“Which rumors would those be?”

“Miss Frances being locked in a room. Her having some kind of dog that roams the woods and eats bad children. I just did my job, that was all, until Mrs. Forsyth dismissed all of us and shut down the house.”

“And you've taken in washing since?”

“It's a way to make a living.”

I looked around the kitchen. Washing must be rather a good
living, by the looks of it—Petra Jennings had a cottage to herself that was above what most servants could afford, and her iron was one of the new electric ones. “How well did you know Frances Forsyth?” I asked.

She deftly flipped a man's shirt onto the ironing board and continued working without looking at me. “Miss Frances never gave me any trouble,” she said, her voice cautious. “She had terrors and spells, but she was always sorry about it afterward. She could be moody—angry or weeping. Some days she'd sleep straight through the day without getting out of bed. She wasn't normal, but she never gave me any trouble. Mrs. Forsyth wasn't pleasant to work for, I don't mind saying, but the wages were good enough.”

“Miss Jennings,” Alex said. Something in his tone made her put down the iron and turn to look at him again. “You were there the day Frances died.”

She stared at him like a snake stares at a charmer. “Yes,” she said.

“Can you tell me where you were that day? Exactly what happened?”

“It wasn't me that found her,” Miss Jennings said. “I was in the kitchen. It was Helen—oh, I don't remember her last name. She was a maid. She was the one that found her.”

Alex nodded. “Go on.”

She blinked, but still she looked at him, something in her expression beginning to chill me. “Helen was screaming and screaming. I came running up the stairs from the kitchen. I went to the front door, but it was already open, and Mrs. Forsyth was standing on the front step, looking. She didn't say anything. She was a cold woman, and a mean mistress, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone.”

“What else?” Alex asked, his voice quiet.

“I looked past her. You were there, sir. You had taken off your overcoat and put it over Miss Frances so no one could see. Helen was
being sick in the bushes. One of the gardeners came around the corner, and you shouted at him to call a doctor.”

The kitchen was quiet for a moment. I could not imagine the horror of it. I could not.

“What else do you remember?” Alex asked at last.

“Nothing, sir. I went back into the house. The servants were all talking in the kitchen. I didn't want to be out front anymore, didn't want to see. Eventually the doctor came, and the police. They asked us questions, and then they went away.”

“Did you see anyone else when it happened?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you see Mr. Forsyth?”

“No, sir. I don't believe he was home.”

“What about Mr. Wilde?”

She shook her head. “He wasn't there, sir.”

“Yes, he was,” Alex coaxed. “Do you not recall?”

She paused, then shook her head again. “I'm sorry, sir. I didn't see him. If he was there, I don't recall it.”

It went on like this for a few more minutes, with Alex prodding her memory, but Miss Jennings had nothing more to say. Finally, we rose to take our leave.

“You won't tell anyone you talked to me, will you?” she asked as she walked us to the door. “I told you, I don't talk about the family. I don't want a reputation as a gossip.”

“It's quite all right,” Alex said. He turned to her on the step and put on his hat. “You have my discretion.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

He walked down the step toward the motorcar, but when I moved to follow, Petra Jennings gripped my arm. “I know you won't listen to me, but I'll say it anyway,” she said.

I paused and looked at her. “What is it?”

“Your husband.” Her face was washed of color in the overcast
light, her eyes large in her narrow face, her grip cold on my arm. “Everyone said he was dead.”