Terrible Tide (11 page)

Then she picked out the shape of a small boat sliding out from under the bluff, and she knew. That mysterious glow had to be Ellis Parlett’s plastic jug, daubed with luminous paint, so he could find it in the dark. Ellis must be going back to collect his new antique.

But why? The dresser had only been in the water a few hours. Surely the veneer wouldn’t even have begun to peel. Was that really Ellis, or was somebody about to rob his trap?

Holly wished she knew more about boats. She thought she remembered Ellis’s had been pointed at both ends. This one had a lump on its stern that she finally decided must be an outboard motor cocked up out of the water. As her eyes grew more accustomed to the dark, she made out long sticks moving up and down in steady rhythm. Why row against the ferocious currents around Parlett’s Point if you had a motor to do the job for you?

Maybe the motor was out of gas. Then why not go and get some? Because motors made noise. But who would hear? Only herself, Annie, and possibly Mathilde Parlett. What could they do about a motorboat out in the bay?

They could tell people it had been there. If Annie heard an outboard off Parlett’s Point at this ungodly hour, she’d be sure to mention that fact to Bert Walker, then Bert would spread the joke about somebody trying to rob Ellis Parlett’s so-called lobster trap.

According to Sam, everybody in town knew about Ellis’s Tom-Sawyerish skulduggery, or ought to; but how many would know Ellis had been out there this particular evening? Sam did, of course. Could that be Sam in the boat?

Why should it be? He’d kidded with his uncle about watching Ellis, she’d heard him. Bert could have passed on the joke to a few of his cronies downtown before settling down to watch the dancing girls. Surely that wasn’t the old man himself out there? Holly got the impression of a much burlier figure, though that could be because he was wearing oilskins or more likely a life jacket. It would be crazy to be out there without one on a night like this.

Anyway, the boat was definitely going to the buoy. Its glow was hidden now by the low hull. The boatman was crouching over the side. Hauling on the line to raise the dresser, she’d bet. Yes, there was something big and black breaking water. He’d take the rocks out, surely, before he got it into the boat. No, he was doing something else, she couldn’t imagine what.

The boat rocked, the dresser disappeared. The luminous dot was dipping and rising on the roiled water, the oars were churning toward shore. The boatman hadn’t found the chest worth keeping, but why had he expected to? Who’d leave something of value bobbing around on a rope tied to a bleach bottle?

The explanation was perfectly simple. She was asleep and having a nightmare. None of this was real, she wasn’t locked in. She tried the door again and it opened. Then she whacked her knee against the jamb. The pain was no illusion.

All right, she’d been locked in and let out. Was she going back to bed and risk meeting whoever had been playing games with the key, or wasn’t she?

The heck with it. She’d already been brave enough for one night. Holly shut the door again, dragged a heavy armchair against it, and went back to the sofa, to shiver miserably until the black windowpanes turned to gray and Cliff House felt less like a house of horrors.

W
HEN SHE AT LAST
got back to Cousin Edith’s bed it seemed like a haven of safety, but Holly was too keyed-up to stay in it long. She was downstairs before eight o’clock. Annie was there, slumped at the kitchen table, sipping at the inevitable cup of tea.

It was colder this morning. The old housekeeper was huddled into a blue worsted cardigan, darned at the elbows, stained down the front. How many hours had she sat there alone, unkempt, woebegone, hanging on and doing her best? As she started to get up, Holly pushed her gently back into her chair.

“Sit still and drink your tea. I’m going to scramble us some eggs. Do you think Mrs. Parlett would eat them?”

“I don’t know’s I dare give her any, dearie. Gruel and soup’s about all I can get down her these days. I’m afraid anything solid might stick in her throat.”

“I do wish you’d have the doctor,” Holly sighed. “This is too much responsibility for you to handle alone.”

“I know, dearie, but what can I do? Claudine won’t stand for it. He’d send her to the hospital, then they’d be sticking tubes into her instead of letting her go to her Maker in peace. Claudine doesn’t hold with that, and neither do I. When my time comes, dearie, I want you to promise you won’t let them keep me alive for no good reason.”

What was Holly to say? She’d be long gone by then, she hoped. She settled for a smile and a pat, and went on breaking eggs. They dawdled shamefully over breakfast. If Geoffrey Cawne intended to shoot more pictures today, he surely wouldn’t arrive before nine.

He wasn’t coming at all. Holly was nibbling at a last piece of toast she didn’t particularly want when the phone rang.

“Holly? Geoff here. Looks as though I shan’t be able to make it today. Stoodley has to go up to Moncton.”

“Can’t you come without him?”

“To be quite frank, I’d rather not risk it. Unless I could get Miss Parlett to chaperone? Do you suppose there’s any hope?”

Holly smiled grimly into the phone. “There’s no harm in asking.”

“I’ve half a mind to try. If she says yes, may we simply barge along?”

“Barge ahead. We’ll be here.”

Holly put up the receiver and turned to Annie, who’d been pretending not to eavesdrop. “Earl Stoodley’s gone to Moncton and the professor doesn’t want to come alone. He’s going to see if he can get Claudine.”

Annie shook her untidy gray head. “Seems like the smarter they are, the dumber they act. He’s lived here long enough to know better. Claudine vowed never to set foot across this threshold and she never will, not if she lives to be two hundred and a day. Nor will Ellis, as long as she’s around to stop him.”

“But why not? What did Claudine and Mrs. Parlett fight about?”

“Land alive, child, they never fought about anything. Far’s I know, they never even passed the time of day.”

“But that’s crazy! Annie, I can’t believe this.”

“That’s because you don’t know the whole story, dearie.” Annie folded her hands in her lap and said no more.

“Aren’t you going to tell me?” Holly prodded.

“I don’t know if I should. It’s not a thing for a young lady to hear.”

“Annie, I’m no kid. I’m a New York model and whatever your story is, you can bet I’ve heard worse. Come on, I have a right to know.”

“Well, all right. I s’pose you do. It started a long time ago, when I was just a little girl myself. I was still living with my own folks then. Uncle Jonathan and Aunt Maude had been married a fair while, but they didn’t have any children. They’d drive out to see us sometimes on a Sunday and Uncle Jonathan would give us young ones those big copper pennies they used to have. I’ve probably told you this part.”

“You have,” said Holly. “Go on.”

“Yes, dearie. Anyway, as I started to say, they were living here at Cliff House and naturally Aunt Maude had a hired girl to help with the cleaning and all. To make a long story short, this young hussy went and got herself in the family way, and she swore up and down Uncle Jonathan was responsible. Uncle Jonathan said she was lying, and Aunt Maude believed him. My mother said Aunt Maude probably had reason to, seeing as they’d never had any babies of their own, though I suppose I shouldn’t repeat that.”

She fluttered a bit, then settled back to her story. “Anyway, Aunt Maude stuck by Uncle Jonathan even when this snip of a Myrtle dragged him into court with a trumped-up yarn about him forcing his way into her bedroom and such tales as you’d think they’d have thrown her out for a barefaced liar. But I’ll be switched if she didn’t get the jury on her side. It was all men in those days, you know, and some said if they hadn’t nailed Jonathan Parlett as the father, Myrtle could have turned around and laid it on to any one of them. So they found him guilty and the judge said he’d have to pay the mother fifteen dollars a week support money till the child was sixteen years old, or go to jail. That was a lot of money then.”

“But what does that have to do with Claudine?”

“Why, Myrtle’s son was Claudine’s father. Claude, Myrtle called him. That was what really cooked her goose with Aunt Maude. She’d had a twin brother called Claude, because it rhymed with Maude, I expect. Maude was a popular name in those days. My mother’s name was Maude, too. Lillian Maude.”

Annie tried to pretend she wasn’t rubbing away tears. “Where was I? Oh, about Uncle Claude. He was killed in the Boer War and Aunt Maude never got over losing her twin. If she’d had a boy of her own, she was going to name him after him. But she never did, and then this trollop Myrtle went and stuck his name on to her own brat.”

“That was pretty rotten,” Holly had to admit.

“Yes, it was about as bad an insult as one woman could give another. Aunt Maude never forgave Myrtle, and I don’t know’s I would have, either, though I don’t think I’d have taken it out on the boy. Claude Jonathan Parlett was what Myrtle told the town clerk to put on his birth certificate, though he’d no more right to the name than a tomcat. That boy was the spitting image of Big Charlie Black, and from all accounts he had reason to be. Charlie was a handsome devil, in his day.”

“What happened to him?”

“He left Jugtown right after the trial. Myrtle stuck around collecting her fifteen dollars a week till Claude’s sixteenth birthday, then she went off to be with Charlie, leaving Claude here to fend for himself. Folks felt sorry for him and offered him the odd job here and there, but Claude was never one for work. His mother had filled him with too many fairy tales about being born to better things.

“He tried to pester Uncle Jonathan for money, but Aunt Maude put a stop to that. She claimed if Uncle Jonathan gave Claude so much as one cent he wasn’t forced to, folks might start thinking he was the real father, after all. I daresay she was right, but it was hard on the boy. I remember Claude coming here to Cliff House one rainy night, huddled up inside an old sweater somebody’d given him. I was living here myself by then. Maude would never have another hired girl, of course. Anyway, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Claude, but Aunt Maude turned him away as if he’d been a case of walking smallpox. She claimed he was just play-acting to work on her sympathies.”

“Aunt Maude doesn’t sound as if she had many sympathies to work on,” Holly couldn’t resist saying.

“Oh, she wasn’t one to be taken in. Claude got by, one way and another. We went to war with Hitler in 1939 and for want of anything better to do, Claude enlisted. He never got farther overseas than Halifax, but he’d come back here on leave and swagger around in his uniform as if he was General Montgomery. I must admit he cut a dashing figure. Lots of girls in the village would have jumped at the chance to go to the pictures with Claude Parlett. Myself included, if you want the truth. But he never asked me and I wouldn’t have dared anyway, on account of Aunt Maude.”

Annie wet her throat with a sip of cooling tea. “After the war, Claude went off somewhere and folks sort of forgot about him. Then Aunt Maude died. Claude must have seen the death notice somewhere. The funeral was hardly over when he rolled into town, thinking he’d win Uncle Jonathan over now that the old battle-axe was gone. That’s what he always called Aunt Maude.”

“How did he make out?” Holly asked.

“He didn’t. Uncle Jonathan wasn’t around. He’d started going off to Montreal on business trips, or so he said. But one day a year or so after Aunt Maude died, Uncle came back with the sweetest little black-haired lady I ever did see hanging on his arm. ‘Annie,’ he says to me, ‘this is my wife, Mathilde.’

“Well, I was so flustered I didn’t know what to say. I just put my arms around the pair of them and started to cry and say I hoped they’d be happy. And I tell you, dearie, they were. Mathilde just brought this old house to life. She was the happiest person I’ve ever known, though the Lord knows she’d had her share of troubles. Her first husband and their only child had died together of what they used to call infantile paralysis. She’d been left without a penny to live on, so she’d gone to work running a switchboard. That was how Uncle Jonathan got to meet her. It was in some office he used to visit on business. Monkey business I called it, when I found out about Mathilde.”

Annie chortled. “Who could blame him? Mathilde told me after he popped the question, she drew every last penny of her savings out of the bank and blew it on a trousseau that would make him proud to be seen with her. Uncle Jonathan thought that was great, her fixing herself up to please her husband. He said she’d never want for anything after that, and she never did.

“He bought her a washing machine and a trip to Paris, and they had parties with friends of theirs coming all the way from Montreal and dancing to the gramophone. That didn’t happen too often to suit me, I can tell you. They’d get me in from the kitchen, I’d take off my apron and dance with the rest of ’em.

“Mathilde was nice as pie to me. When they went off somewhere, she’d always leave me a big box of chocolates and some new magazines to read. She even made Uncle Jonathan buy me a nice radio to keep me company. It’s been broken now for quite a while. I wish Earl Stoodley would cough up the money to fix it, but I don’t suppose he ever will.”

Annie sighed, then perked up again. “When Uncle Jonathan went away by himself on trips, Mathilde would take me up to Moncton or down to Saint John. Sometimes we’d stay overnight. We’d eat in restaurants and go to the pictures and into stores, and she’d buy me a dress or a pair of shoes or something—even if I didn’t need ’em. Oh, I just loved Mathilde!”

T
HIS TIME HOLLY DIDN’T
try to break the silence. After a while, Annie dried her tears and went on with her story. “Finally, Uncle Jonathan died. He was well into his eighties by then and we knew it was coming, but Mathilde took it awful hard. She was never the same after he went.”

“She must have been pretty old herself by then,” said Holly, thinking of that incredibly ancient body in the bed upstairs.