The Gilded Hour
Page 100

“I don’t think so,” Jack said. “She knew she was dying, sure. What she wanted was not to leave the boys to their father’s tender mercies. He looks like a hard case to me.”
Oscar nodded. “Worse, he looks like a closet hard case. One who uses his fists behind closed doors. They didn’t say anything about bruises on the autopsy, though.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time a body turned up dead with no marks to show how it got that way.”
Oscar swallowed the rest of his coffee. “So she stowed the boys away somewhere, is that what you’re thinking?”
Jack lifted a shoulder. “They could be anywhere, by now. Canada comes to mind.”
“She was from Maine.”
Jack nodded. “I suppose we could get in touch with the Bangor coppers, but it’s a big state.”
“Well.” Oscar reached for his hat. “Tomorrow’s another day, as they say so clever and all. And there’s other things to be thinking about. First and most important, you’ve got to be back here at six thirty to start your shift and you’ve left your new bride all alone, just three days married.”
“Two days,” Jack said. “And five hours.” He rarely flushed, but now color ran up his throat to his face.
Oscar laughed, and slapped him on the back.
•   •   •
HE SLIPPED INTO bed quietly, drawn into the nest of often-washed linen sheets that smelled of sunshine and lavender and Anna. His Anna, her cheeks flushed with sleep, on her side so that he could study her face in the vague soft light of the lamp before he put it out.
One part of him wanted to wake her, but she had earned her rest. There would be more nights and mornings and middays, too, when they’d have privacy and time enough. He’d made sure of it.
27
TUESDAY MORNING NEAR the end of May might have been July, by the weather. Later in the summer Anna would keep an extra set of clothes in her office, but today she was faced with a choice. She could take the noon hour to try to catch up with her paperwork—in which case she’d show up at the inquest wilted and damp with sweat, or she could go home and change.
She went home and found Aunt Quinlan alone in the parlor, smiling as if Anna’s arrival were the only thing in the world she had ever wished for. In return Anna might have started to cry. Things had happened so quickly, and she had let herself be drawn along without taking time for her aunt.
“Get changed quickly,” Auntie said. “And I’ll arrange things down here.”
By the time she got back Mrs. Lee had put out a plate of sandwiches and a pot of tea and disappeared back into the kitchen. Anna sat just beside her aunt and gently picked up one of her hands. They were very delicate, as if the bones had gone as hollow as a bird’s. The skin was soft and shiny and speckled with age spots.
“You’ve been using the wax bath for your joints,” Anna said. “I hope it helps with the pain.”
“It does,” her aunt said. “The heat is wonderful. And the teas, they help too.”
But not enough, Anna knew. This woman who had spent all her life doing things with her hands would sit just as she was, for whatever time was left to her.
“I can remember you painting,” Anna said. “You handled the paintbrush like I handle a scalpel. I was little, but I remember.”
“You were seven when I stopped.”
Anna nodded. “When you were working I had the idea that you were painting a window I could walk through if I tried.”
Her aunt smiled. “Very fanciful, for such a serious young mind. You were so quiet, sitting in the corner. I often forgot you were there. Of course that was before Sophie.”
Anna remembered what it had felt like to be alone. “I love Sophie and Cap,” Anna said. “And wouldn’t change a thing, but sometimes it’s nice to have you to myself.”
“So,” Aunt Quinlan said. “Here we are, by ourselves. You married Jack Mezzanotte.”
Anna laughed. “Yes, I did. Although sometimes it all feels unreal. Was it like that when you got married?”
Her aunt’s expression was thoughtful. After a moment she said, “You know that your aunt Hannah’s people believe that the dead are never far away. She told me once—and this was before she met Ben—that her first husband and little boy sometimes came from the Shadowlands to talk to her. Some people dislike that idea because it frightens them. But when Simon died, I waited and waited. I wanted him to come back to talk to me, in my dreams at least. I wanted to scold him for being so reckless on the ice floes, the day he died. And he did come, finally, but by that time I wasn’t angry at him anymore. I just missed him.
“He still comes now and then, and when he does he looks as he did when we were young. Sometimes he has our littlest three girls with him, the ones we lost too soon.”
“And Nathaniel?”
Aunt Quinlan talked sometimes about her son, the last of six and the only boy. Nathaniel Ballentyne had died at Shiloh, on his twenty-fifth birthday, unmarried, childless.
“Nathaniel most of all,” her aunt said. “He knew how angry I was about him going off to fight. He’s been trying to make it up to me ever since. Sometimes he is as real to me as you are, sitting there.”
She shook herself a little. “Enough of that. There was something I wanted to tell you, and you let me wander off.”
Anna tried to prepare her mind, but Aunt Quinlan’s stories were never predictable.
“As a little girl you already knew what it meant to lose the people you love, and that made you shy. Then the war came along and we lost Paul and Harrison, and made it ten times worse. When you and Cap got to be friends I thought, Maybe he’ll pull her out of it, and he did. A good ways, he brought you back to being brave enough to face the world. Sophie brought you along even further. But it’s there in you still, the need to hide away.”
Anna had heard this before and she knew that it was at least in part true.
“So you’re saying Jack is going to change my view of things?”
Aunt Quinlan looked at her with an expression that was pure surprise. “That would be a silly thing to say, Anna. You know as well as I do that people rarely change once they reach a certain age. What I’m saying is, you’re a turned-inward soul; it’s the way you cope with the hard things in life. You hide away.”
“You think Jack doesn’t realize that about me.”
“Maybe he does,” her aunt said. “But if he does it’s only in his mind; he doesn’t know what it will feel like. I’m taking a long time to get to my point, so here it is. Hard things come along; they always have and they always will. When that time comes, you have to turn toward Jack and not away from him. And that’s not in your nature. You love the man—don’t bother blushing, I know you love him even if you can’t say the word in your own mind—but your first instinct will be still to shut him out. So be aware of that, and do what you can to stop yourself.”
Anna tried to smile. It made sense that Aunt Quinlan would worry about such things, simply because she had suffered so many losses herself. Nathaniel was gone, but she had also lost three girls before age ten, one to childbirth, and her second youngest to a cancer of the breast when she was just fifty. Only her oldest was left. There were grandchildren and great-grandchildren; she had her brother Gabriel, though she hadn’t seen him in a long time for the simple reason that she would not go home to the village where she was born, and he wouldn’t leave it. She was closest to her sister-in-law Martha, who wrote every week and did sometimes come to the city. And there were nieces and nephews and their families. But she felt the losses, and how could she not?
She said, “Auntie, I was right here, beside you, when the worst news came. I’d like to think that I learned something from you. That I have some of your strength.”
“That’s just it,” her aunt said. “That’s the hardest part, being strong enough to let the hurt in, and deal with it, and then let it settle in time, as it will.”
“Yes,” Anna said. “I see that. I can make one promise at least. I will think of you and this conversation when things are hard, and try not to turn away from it.”
“That’s all I’m asking,” said her aunt. “Now eat before you have to go off to the courthouse, or Mrs. Lee will scold me without mercy.”
“I have a few more minutes.” Anna bit into a sandwich, thinking. When she swallowed she said, “You’ve been following the news about Janine Campbell in the paper?”
“I have.”
“The rumors going around are that she killed her boys.”
Aunt Quinlan had a particular look, one that said she was at the end of her patience, and it was there now. “That’s pure foolishness.”
Anna swallowed another bite. “What do you think happened to them?”
“I can’t say, but I do know that nobody is asking the real question, the important one. Ubi est morbus?”
Anna laughed out loud to hear her aunt quoting the great physician Morgagni. Where is the disease?