Deadly Thyme (10 page)

Oh
, if only you knew!
Perhaps it was the unexpected compassion in his tone of voice and the fact that after so many years, someone else knew. Ruth found she couldn’t put a stopper in the flood of tears. “It’s just … the feeling of losing … she seemed here a moment ago. I can’t believe she’s not … coming home. I keep thinking she’s visiting a friend.”

“Mrs. Butler, they say bad things come in threes. I
’d say you’ve had all your bad things.” Trewe’s eyes were not so terrible after all—piercing, direct—but not terrible. She pulled an afghan from the back of the couch tight around her shoulders.

Trewe finished his tea. “You
’re young.”

Ruth shook her head. “Please don
’t say that. It’s not good enough.”

“No
, I expect not. Do you have any relatives here?”

“No.”

“Without family,” Trewe said quietly, “this must be especially hard.”

“My mother is terrified of flying. Always has been,
but not because of what happened in New York. ‘There’s terrorists everywhere’ is what she says to me.” She rubbed her wet cheeks. “This is when I think most about moving back. But I can’t leave now … not without my daughter.”

“And I
’m sure you’d be missed here.”

It touched Ruth that he would offer that thought.

“Would you like me to stay?” Allison Craig asked. Allison’s wild hair floated out from her face despite several clasps. “I could help out with the phone, the email.”

Ruth shook her head. “Really, today I got by alone. It
’s at night I’m afraid of my own shadow, but Sally stays with me.”

Rising, Trewe nodded in Allison
’s direction. “If there’s nothing else, Mrs. Butler.”

“Before you go there
’s something I should show you.” She went to a bookshelf near the door. She pulled a book forward, flipped it open and extracted an envelope. “I found this taped to my door yesterday.”

She handed it to Trewe.

Trewe’s face closed up as he studied the picture. “This is your daughter.”

“It was taken on Sunday morning, when she was on the beach. Those are the clothes she was wearing.”

Allison crowded over Trewe’s shoulder to view the picture. “Good detail. Perhaps an IP camera.”

“Who was on the beach, this near the girl, except
…” he didn’t finish the sentence. He glanced into Ruth’s eyes.

She
knew he hadn’t wanted to say, “except the one who took her.”

“May I keep this?” he asked.

“I’ve already made a copy.”

“Mrs. Butler, we
’ve taken enough of your time. Thank you.” He nodded and stepped aside as Allison passed him. He followed on her heels to his car as the rain began again in earnest.

Ruth pushed the door shut behind the two police officers. She was emotionally drained, but she sat down to check her email, just in case someone was trying to get in touch. She had a new email.

             
[email protected]

             
Subject: For you

             
Lazy Annie has grown so fine

             
She can’t get up to feed the swine,

             
But lies in bed till eight or nine.

             
Lazy Annie Butler.

She pivoted. It
would
be best for Constable Craig to stay; the police needed to have this email. She stood. She should, at least, call them back inside. She hesitated. Should she call Sally? Before she could decide, the doorbell rang. Detective Chief Inspector Trewe must have forgotten something. She would show him this email.

She opened the door.

It wasn’t the chief inspector.

12

W
hen the figure on the porch came forward from the gloom of the wet day, Ruth drew in a gasp. The short, square woman with a round, flushed face peered at her over her rain-speckled glasses. The woman’s hair had definitely gone much grayer and thinner than the last time Ruth had seen her.

“Momma?”

“Well! I don’t know what ‘a penny for a pound’ means in this gosh-darn, cold, wet place! And what in God’s name is a ‘Euro-dollar?’ I can’t even get what a ‘pence’ means.” She shook a rolled-up newspaper in Ruth’s face. “This is a great picture of Bubba—a detestable ugly mug if ever I saw one.”

The harsh, bravado voice resounded against the porch
’s slate walls. Ruth certainly never imagined her mother would brave the seas and air to come to England, but she had never been so relieved. “Is it really you?”

Mrs. Thompson stood on the step in her red coat, the same coat she had worn when Ruth was a girl. It stretched threadbare thin in places. One of the buttons dangled loose,
hanging on by a thread.

Ruth pulled her mother into the house, putting her arms around her. “
Momma? I—how did you get here?”

Her mom returned the hug, squeezing tight. “Amazing what a little Valium can do. They should pass them out with the peanuts on planes. Thankfully
, they were generous with the wine, too.”

“What?”

“Had to have something. Supposed to be eleven hours!” Her voice was overloud.

Ruth smiled to hear her mother, see her mother,
for the first time in so many years and especially now. “Wasn’t it?”

“I don
’t remember. Good medicine. Your Aunt Maybe’s suggestion. Blame her! Can a body get something decent to drink around here besides tea, Ruth-Ann?” Her voice rose to loud, as if she were talking through a wall. “I’ve got enough caffeine in this body, I could have carried that taxi. And there aren’t enough bathrooms to accommodate, I can tell you right now!” Her voice was gravelly. She must have been yelling a lot.

Mrs. Thompson glanced around. “My land and stars! That taxi driver is still sitting there! He doesn
’t want my credit card and I don’t have the right kind of money. If that don’t beat all, I don’t know what does.”

Ruth glanced out. A rumbling taxi exhausted black fumes into the tiny street. And worse, it was a black taxi. No telling how much this was going to be because he would have kept his meter running all this time. “I
’ll take care of it,” she said, and prepared herself to haggle.

“Dang! I
’ve got to find a bathroom.”

“Through there, Momma.” Ruth pointed. She grabbed some money out of her purse and ran out in the rain to the taxi.

Her mother came back into the sitting room at the same moment Ruth finished instructing the taxi driver where to deposit the rest of the luggage. She shook off most of the rain inside the door. An exhilarating wave of emotion swept over her—her teeth chattered, her knees jellied—but all she could do was stand mute and stare at this pleasant-faced, frumpy woman in her late fifties. Ann Thompson wore her mousy, blond hair curly on top to hide the thin, gray roots. Her mother was here.

“All the way from London in a taxi? It must have taken forever.”

Her mother laughed, “Forever. But daughter, I am glad to see you. I’m so sorry about Annie.”

Ruth
’s voice choked with emotion. “You’re here. Oh Momma, you came! Are you sure no one would trace you? Though it doesn’t matter much now, with his face all over the place, he’ll soon follow unless he’s been here all along.”

“No, he couldn
’t be.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I can’t believe you didn’t get that email.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We only found out about this a week or so ago. We sent you an email immediately. Now we realize you never got it.”

“Got it?”

“You’re just not going to believe it!” The plump woman hugged Ruth, speaking into her hair. She choked back a loud sob. “I couldn’t stay home, my sweet girl. The minute I heard, I started my plan—plane or no plane, ocean or no ocean—and despite Bubba’s awful family, and the extra cost of baggage, and full-body scans, blast it, I’d get to you.”

Growing up, Ruth had always been a little afraid of her mother
—her strength, her commanding voice, her constant movement—the unflappable, Blitzkrieg of mothers. That remembered image could not describe this lady. Standing before her now was a short, untidy woman with tears streaming down her care-worn face.

Shaken, Ruth said, “Momma
, what’s going on?”

They clung to each other. Her mom cried out. “Oh
, how I’ve missed you and baby Annie!” After a few minutes, her mom kissed Ruth lightly, let her go and headed for the brandy decanter. “I was plannin’ to come see you before this happened, I have to tell you. The shock of this … Have they any idea where she is, honey?”

Ruth collapsed on the couch. “He
’s gone and done it. He’s taken her.”

“Maybe emailed you.”

“What do you mean? Which email? You’ve been speaking in code or something. I’m not getting it.”

“Your
ex is dead, honey. Has been. For two weeks.”

Climbing the windswept hills, Ruth watched white foam slash against the rocks in the surf below. She
’d just come from speaking to DCI Trewe for the third time that day to tell him that her ex-husband was dead, so it couldn’t be him that took Annie. It couldn’t be him, so it had to be someone else. Her heart shuddered deep inside. What kind of life had she brought her daughter to? Who had her? What was going on?

While w
alking the night before, she had thought someone was following her. It was an odd sensation. But it would explain the emails, the phone calls, and the shadowy figure watching her house from across the street. She had heard the footfall barely in step with her own. She’d called out and no one had responded. It wasn’t right. Why were they after her? Why would anyone wish her harm here? Who had a vendetta against her? Who had picked up the slack from her dead ex-husband?

She went home. Her mother was in the kitchen, scraping the stone floor with a knife on her hands and knees.

“Mom, you don’t have to do that.”

“It
’s dingy.”

“You
’re disturbing hundreds of years of dirt.”

“I couldn
’t sit.”

“I get it, but cleaning the floor doesn
’t change anything.”

“Daughter of mine, don
’t reckon you can act as if you know everything. I know a few things, too.”

“I made the decision to live here. It was better than staying near Wallis. We were safe from him here.”

“You were safe from him after he got sick. I told you that.”

“You never could accept that he would find a way to hurt me no matter how sick he was. He
’s got family that’s as bad as he was. He’d use them from beyond the grave if he could. That’s how determined he was to hurt me and, more importantly, to hurt Annie.”

Her mother pointed to one of Ruth
’s paintings of Annie. “She took after you in looks.”

How dare her mother use the past tense. Ruth wanted to yell, but she whispered, “Takes, not took!”

“I’m not here to fight.” Her mother kept scrubbing. She was using a dish rag to wipe her face. Her shoulders were jerking.

“I know.
” Ruth took a deep breath. She realized her mother was crying. “It feels like it’s all part of the same discussion. We used the same language ten years ago.”

Her mother shook her rag at Ruth. “Everything I said made it worse. You told me to mind my own business. Then you went and married the bastard.” She was sobbing without sound, and scrubbing.

Light filtered hazily into the kitchen. Strong gusts of wind pushed against the window. All at once, Ruth sensed what her mother must have felt when her daughter left. “I was an idiot.”

“Ruth-Ann
,” her mother rubbed her face dry, “I need to speak mother to mother. I realize that you needed to move here then. But now … with this? And Bubba dead? His folks don’t care about you; they’ve got enough worries on their plate with Bubba’s youngest sister.” Her mother’s red-rimmed eyes glittered with unshed tears. “Ruth-Ann, why don’t you just pack up and come home? You can do it now. There is no court case against you. There will be no problems. I can arrange everything. We can leave—as soon as all this is settled.”

“It sounds as if everything
’s settled already.” Ruth stood. Nothing changes does it? Another world existed parallel to hers—the hot, muggy world of a childhood that circled her like a merry-go-round, constantly casting her back into the guilt from leaving.

Here in Cornwall, she had found a life that meshed differences into familiarities. She had never been brave enough to admit that she had left the flat landscape of the Gulf coast not only to escape an abusive husband
, but to escape her mother—her take-no-prisoners, controlling mother. It had been her attempt to make familiarities from differences.

“I
’m not ever going back,” Ruth said.

“What do you mean? I don
’t understand.”

“This is my home. Annie and I were
—are
—happy here.” She paused to think about it. There are places in the heart, geographic places the heart knows nothing about—like rare art hidden in an attic—until one fine day, a day of exploration, those places are discovered in the real world and recognized, as if the heart had found its true home.

Her mother gripped her arm.
“But you can’t stay here, Ruth-Ann. There’ll always be bad memories.”

“There
’ll always be the best memories, too. I can’t leave that.”

“But dear, your family is in Texas.”

“My friends are here. My family can visit.” And until the words left her mouth Ruth had never been so certain she wanted to remain in Cornwall.

Annie Butler lay on her side. The mattress beneath her smelled like the time she forgot to tell her mother she had spilled the milk in the pantry. She remember
ed what the button was that dangled by her face. It was an old mattress button. She had taken it and kept it tightly clutched in her free hand. Something about it gave her comfort. She didn’t know anything about where she was or what was happening to her, except that now she smelled bad all over. How long had she been here and why was it so cold? How long was she supposed to be here, and why wasn’t she allowed to move? Her brain couldn’t think. That was it. It was as if she couldn’t wake up.

The rag on her eyes wasn
’t tied tight, so she could slip it to the side enough to see. There was the pale blue ticking of the mattress above her and the spotted mattress below her. It was hard to make out. A pale light came in through the cracks around her cocoon. She could bring one hand to her face and see her fingers, like she was under covers and the sun hadn’t come up yet.

But no, she wasn
’t home. This was no place she knew. She remembered that she had been on the beach with Dot but nothing after that. She knew how to get away from a stranger and how to defend herself, so how did she end up here?