The Widow's Club (40 page)

“What a foolish question. Life for me began to fall apart when you got married and I realised that none of the important things—looks, charm, style—counted for anything.”

“Does Rowland fit into this?”

She smirked audibly, said, “See you Saturday evening,” and hung up.

I almost wished the phone would ring again. The prospect of nothing to do stared me in the face. My thoughts weren’t good company. Had I read too much into my conversation with Ann? She had admitted she hadn’t loved Charles and that she wanted him dead. We had discussed a book by a local author and played a silly charade of writing to an advice columnist. I had felt concern for Bunty as the wife-in-the-way; but as it seemed highly unlikely that a wife-murdering organisation had set itself up in competition with The Widows Club, Ann would surely be content with trying to break up the Wisemans’ marriage. An anonymous letter here, a venomous word there … I paced the flagstones in the hall.

Desperation, it was once said by my mother, makes geniuses of us all. Inspiration struck as I foresaw an afternoon—alone—of listening to the clock tick.

The Peerless Nursing Home. Confirmation or negation could be found there. So, alas, could Dr. Bordeaux. Grabbing the telephone before I could lose my nerve, I dialed directory enquiries, got the number, and stuffed a finger, which felt big and boneless as a sausage, into the dial hole. In that moment I empathised deeply with obscene callers everywhere.

“The Peerless Nursing Home.”

“Gggg.” In deepening my voice it went so low I lost it. Start again. “Good afternoon, this is Nurse Jones”—oh, come on!—“from the Cottage Hospital. Our Dr. Brown … ing is having some problems with a patient in Psychiatric—a woman with sixty-one different personalities, a record, Dr. Browning believes, and he wonders if Dr. Simon Bordeaux would be free to come over immediately and offer some helpful hints? The case promises to be written up in all major medical journals.”

“I’m sure Doctor would have been only too pleased,
Nurse Jones. But this is Doctor’s afternoon off. He has already left the premises. If another time would suit Dr. Browning?”

“I don’t think so; the patient isn’t expected to live more than half an hour. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so to speak.”

His day off! What luck! My breath exploded in a whoosh of relief as the receiver hit the cradle. What did I have to lose on entering The Peerless and making contact with one or more of its patients? Other than my life, that is. And if I played my part well, the part of a would-be patient checking out the nursing home to see if it offered the right … no, the wrong facilities, I should not only be safe, but informed. I smiled up at Abigail’s portrait. She appeared to wink, but it may have been a shadow hitting the portrait from the window.

There are advantages to having seen fatter days. I did not have to search far in my wardrobe to find a garment with stretch appeal. The dress which I held against me and surveyed in the mirror had huge white spots on a red background. Not ideal. With my coat gaping open, it would be possible to see me coming or going for miles around. But I decided I liked the dropped elastic waist more than I disliked the spots. Now—a major decision. Should I use a pillow? No, too big. A chair cushion worked but didn’t provide the look I wanted. I wished to appear so imminently pregnant that no starch-crackling nurse would dare raise her voice above a whisper to me. I wandered about the bedroom, practising maternity posture. What would make the ideal baby? Oh, for Dorcas! She would have come up with a bright idea. Bright, that was it! I sped along to my friend’s old room, sniffed the air nostalgically for a whiff of Athletic Woman’s Talc, and found the bag of balloons, the remains of those she had strung up for the engagement party. Dear Dorcas, everything in its place and a place for everything. I could almost hear her voice: “Frightfully spiffing of you to attempt this, old girl.” Mmmmm. She might not think it so spiffing if she came home from the States to find me not in my place.

The balloon looked great, but being light, it tended to shift. A problem easily solved by filling it with water. I decided against wearing it while driving the car. Into a
carrier it went. On with my camel coat, over the shoulder with my bag, and down to tell Magdalene and Poppa that I had some shopping to do.

“Nice to have so much free time on your hands, Giselle.” Sunshine sparks flew off Magdalene’s knitting needles; the jacket she was making for Sweetie grew even as I watched.

It seemed a safe kindness to ask her to join me. Since the fateful evening at Abigail’s, Magdalene had stayed close to home, although she was no longer fanatical about locking windows and doors.

Poppa looked up from his cake carving and smoothed his bald spot. “Go, Maggie, why don’t you?” His voice sounded … creaky. And why wouldn’t it? He spoke to her so rarely.

The needles slowed.

“On second thought,” I said, feeling as if I had offered a sweet to a child and snatched it back, “it is still unseasonably chilly.”

“Wouldn’t do, then. Maggie’s always had a chesty chest.” Poppa cleared his throat and got back to carving.

As I crossed the courtyard to the car, I heard a creak behind me and felt a presence, but I didn’t slow my pace. I wasn’t going to give Tobias the pleasure of thinking he could scare me out of my wits, not that easily. And I wasn’t much concerned about the Raincoat Man. The average person only has the capacity to be petrified of one thing at a time. Besides, I had strong suspicions that the Raincoat Man was Butler, out on surveillance, even though he had responded to the suggestion with—“Me, madam? But I h’understood you to say the fellow had ’orrible teeth.” My one concern was that the balloon might burst before I got to The Peerless. Nose pressed to the steering wheel, I bounced down Cliff Road.

As I rounded the first bend, I spied Mr. Edwin Digby and Mother coming toward me. Her feathers had an icy gloss to them, and she was poking him along with her beak. Dropping down so that my knees grazed the car floor I concentrated on neither seeing nor hearing when Mr. Digby’s voice was blown in my face by the wind.

“Incomparable weather for a stiff neck, Mrs. Haskell.”

Ditto a stiff drink at The Dark Horse. I wished I didn’t have this sneaking liking for Mr. Digby. I wished I didn’t suspect
him of being the evil force behind a murder network. I wished … that life wasn’t littered with foolish wishes.

The Heinz showed its true colours as I exited the village. Its whine turned fretful, eerily echoing the wind. A couple of times I swear it tried to go backward. But the secret was never to let it get the upper hand. I had just given the gear knob a vicious twist when I beheld the long, high wall of the nursing home. A yellow van inched around me, then a dark green car slashed past. The steering wheel vibrated in my hands, but my eyes were on the stone eagles atop the pillars. I passed through the entrance and down the avenue until—there loomed the mammoth stone house. At that point, I fervently wished the avenue could have gone on to John O’Groats.

I stopped, positioned the balloon, then drove forward a few more yards to park in the middle of the gravel semicircle. Sneakiness oft draws attention to itself, and if matters went awry, I needed to be able to leap from the top of that flight of steps into the Heinz. Telling myself that all the signs were favourable (the bloodhounds Sin and Virtue weren’t out and about today), I gathered my courage in my clammy paws, got my legs going, and lifted the door knocker. It fell like a lead … balloon. All too promptly the door opened. Facing me was a large nurse in a small frilly cap.

“May I help you?” She had eyes like pellets and a face which had been chiseled into shape. She breathed Detol the way Roxie breathed Attar of Roses.

Pressing both palms against the small of my back, I stepped inward, forcing her to step back. “I’m—Mrs. Heinz. You are expecting me, I hope? My doctor sent me to have a look at the place to see if I could be comfortable here during my confinement.”

The nurse stared at me. Had I blown it too soon by using a word no longer in maternity jargon? I moved my hands to place them protectively on the protrusion jutting through my gaping coat.

“We don’t
confine
people here.” The nurse’s face bleached out to match her white cardigan. “I don’t know what you’ve been told, but this most certainly isn’t a prison.”

“I can see that, indeed I think the place looks most
inviting.” Taking another step forward, I fixed eager eyes on the black-and-white checkerboard floor, the white walls rising to a lofty and ornately plastered ceiling. The staircase, also painted white (criminally, in my opinion), rose at the end of the hall, facing the front door; it went up steeply for a dozen steps, then divided.

“Mrs. Heinz?” The nurse jammed the door shut. “Are you having a nervous breakdown?”

“What, in my condition!” I clasped a hand to my throat. “Dear Dr. Padinsky”—if he was good enough for Magdalene, he was good enough for me—“has warned me repeatedly that trauma of any kind could be hazardous to the baby, which is why he insisted I look this place over.”

“Mrs. Heinz,” the nurse replied in a harsh, cold voice, “how will visiting a nursing home for emotionally disturbed women help you to a problem-free delivery?”

A chair, painted white, was at hand. Legs spread, back arched, I lowered myself into it. “Don’t tell me,” I bleated, “that this isn’t Chitterton Fells Maternity Home?”

“It is not.” She had the door open. “You haven’t come much off course. Turn left on the Coast Road, proceed two miles, and you can’t miss it—a modern, red brick building.” She was close to smiling at the prospect of being rid of me.

“Why silly me!” I gave a light laugh which tapered off into a most satisfactory “ooo-ooch!” Gripping my hands to my balloon stomach, I rolled my eyes and lolled my head sideways.

Nurse let go of the doorknob in a hurry. “What is it? Do you think you are in labour?” Her eyes were almost kind, but I wasn’t fooled. That was a blackbird brooch protruding from beneath the white cardigan,

“I’ve been having these twinges. Dr. Padinsky says they are warnings, that I must rest.” A small shudder. “Oh, what would he say if he knew I must get into my car and drive when feeling like this?” I addressed her nose. “Would it be possible for me to lie down somewhere quiet? These episodes usually last only half an hour …”

She glanced, furtively it seemed to me, around the antiseptic hall.

“I can’t risk hurting the baby or having Dr. Padinsky cross with us—I mean, me.” Although I had quickly changed that last word, the plural had done its job.

“No, of course not. And we do pride ourselves on our
personal approach at The Peerless.” She sounded conciliatory, almost jolly, as she placed a hand on my arm. “This is Dr. Bordeaux’s afternoon off, otherwise I know he would have been only too pleased to examine you.”

“That would have been wonderful.”

The nurse’s strong fingers handcuffed my wrist as she led me under the righthand sweep of stairs into a room that in the days when this was a house and not a nursing home had probably been a parlour. French doors led into the garden, and I could see a corner of the Dower House. With a pang, I thought of Jenny, her invalid mother, and the old nanny. It was easy to say they would all be better off when removed from the doctor’s criminal clutches, but the shock of disclosure would be shattering.

“This is the visitor’s waiting room.” The nurse helped me onto a tweedy brown couch. “I will just take your pulse and blood pressure.”

“Please, I really don’t feel up to that sort of thing.”

“What if I fetch a glass of water?”

“That’s very kind, but I would prefer to be left completely alone for that half hour. I can never relax if I think someone is going to come into the room just as I am drifting off to sleep.”

“Very well.” She straightened an embroidered chair-back, which looked as though it had been an occupational therapy project, and left the room.

I forced myself to wait a full minute after the door clicked shut before tiptoeing up from the couch. The door handle, when I lowered it, made a fearsome noise, but when I pressed an eye to the thin strip of opening, the hall looked deserted. Crossing it, however, was like swimming the channel.

My dash up the stairs to the third floor felt like scaling a wall. Drying my palms on the sides of my coat, I tapped on the door immediately to my left, then, allowing a scant second for a response, depressed the handle. The door didn’t budge.

“Nurse, is that you?” wheedled a voice. “I’ll let you have my sago pudding for a week if you’ll talk Doctor out of giving me any more injections.”

“Hope you’re feeling better, Mrs. Freebrun.” I read her name off the doorplate. Was her door locked because
she was an especially difficult patient, clinging obstinately to remorse? Or did she pose a danger to her doctor, should she escape and denounce him as a villain?

I tried the doors of Mary Wallace, Doris Barch, Ida Parkhurst. The same; no admittance. Would I be wasting valuable time were I to attempt a conversation through one of their keyholes? And how could I inspire instant trust?

“Ida, I am a missionary worker. Will you help me reach my daily quota of redeemed souls?”

No answer from Ida, but what was that noise? The handle slid wetly out from my grasp. There it came again, identifiable now as footsteps mounting the stairs. Caught with my neck in the rope. No escape, except by leaping the bannister railing, and I couldn’t take that route; not in my condition. Breaking into a fog of perspiration, I grabbed the next handle down the line, bracing myself for what was to come. Amazingly, this door opened. Quicker than one can say, “Nurse,” I was inside. It was a household cupboard, crammed with mops, buckets, brooms, and the reek of disinfectant.

All this I saw at a glance from the ruddy glow of a cigarette lighter.

“Hello, my love,” said the other occupant of the cupboard placidly.

She was seated on the base of a Hoover, lighting up a cigarette. She looked a nice enough woman, meaning she wasn’t dressed as a nurse, but I eyed her in horror as I pressed a finger to my lips. If the person on patrol smelled smoke or saw it creeping out from under the door, we were done for. The same applied if the fiery tip of the cigarette got any closer and I popped. I held my breath. The lighter snapped shut. The footsteps drew level with the door, then passed on. Tomorrow I would take out stock in disinfectant.