To The Grave (37 page)

There was another letter, Mena.

It wasn’t until sometime in December - a month later when we were both back in England - that we fully knew what we had done.  Your mother had kept Danny’s last letter to you.  She showed it to Mary, saying that she had kept it from you because she didn’t want you to go to America - didn’t want the family split up like that.  When I saw the letter, I took it from Mary and I kept it, and that was the last time we saw each other - neither one of us being able to look upon the other’s face again without seeing Danny and being reminded of what we had done.

We denied our love as we had denied yours, Mena.

After that I vowed to do whatever I could to make up for the terrible wrong I had done, but your mother would not let you go and I lost you for many years.  Then when at last I found you again, your life seemed too settled to warrant further upset from me, so I did what I could for you, knowing that it would never be enough.  For all of this I am truly sorry.

When Tayte stopped reading the silence in the room seemed to reflect how everyone around the table felt.  No one spoke for several seconds.

Today is all we have and tomorrow is for dreamers
, Tayte thought, recalling the line from one of Danny’s letters to Mena.  He thought how prophetic it was in light of what had happened to him.

“That’s all there is,” he said.  He placed the bible on the table and flattened the cover with his palm.  “I’ve reached the end of the account.”

Wells sat forward in his chair.  “I believe this is the other letter Edward Buckley refers to,” he said as he slid it towards Tayte.

It was written on blue airmail paper, the thin edges yellow with age.  Tayte unfolded it.  It was dated Saturday, November 18th, 1944 and it was written by Danny.  Tayte gave it no more than a cursory glance before he read it out.

My darling Mena,

I was more upset than I can say at hearing what happened to you back in May.  I wish with all my heart that you had told me sooner so I could have done something about that no good rat, Victor Montalvo.  He should have been strung up for what he did to you and I can see how scared you must have been.  Telling me about it was a brave thing to do, Mena, and I want you to know that it doesn’t change a thing between us.  I’ll help raise the child as if it were my own.  Heck, we’ll have a whole bunch of kids if you like so don’t you worry yourself.  I’ll take good care of the both of you.  We’ll get married just as soon as I can get back, which might be sooner than you think.

There’s talk of extended leave for those of us who pulled through Holland.  We’re in France now and I can’t tell you where but there’s talk of passes to Paris.  I don’t want to raise your hopes, Mena, but I’m going to see if I can cut Paris short and catch a ride to England afterwards.  So don’t be surprised if you see me walking down the lane toward your house one fine day, whistling a tune with my hands in my pockets, looking like I was the happiest man alive.

By the way, Mena, I never did get the chance to tell you the name I was born with.  I made that promise to you so I’ll tell you now.  What you have to understand is that my folks settled in America from Norway and they’re a traditional bunch even to this day.  My mom called me Ednar.  I can see you smiling at that as everyone who hears it does, and I’m sure you can understand why I kept it to myself when I enlisted.  No one outside my family ever pronounced the ‘R’ so it sounded more like Edna, which was hardly right for a fighting man in the tough 82nd Airborne.

I’m so keen to post this letter to you, Mena, that I’ll end now.  I miss you more each day and I just wish I could hold you in my arms until I knew you felt better about everything bad that’s happened.  I’ll write again soon, but if I get that pass I could be with you before another letter has chance to reach you.

I love you, Mena.

Ednar ‘Danny’ Danielson.

Chapter Forty-Nine

S
utton Bassett was one of very few villages in England to have a church without a cemetery, having been built as an annexe to the church at nearby Weston by Welland.  Tayte had driven there with Eliza under the direction of Kenneth Wells soon after reading Danny’s last letter and Wells had told them that Mena had been laid to rest in the Wells family plot, having come to be considered over the years as family in all but name.

As they entered beneath the lych-gate in the shadow of the church’s Norman tower, Tayte looked up into the late afternoon sky and thought about the irony of what had happened to the Lasseter family.  If Margaret Lasseter hadn’t kept Danny’s letter, the misunderstanding between Joan and Mena would have been undone before any lasting damage could have been caused. 
That was the real catalyst in all this,
he thought.  The very action Mena’s mother had taken, believing that it would keep the family together, tore it apart.

“The weather’s going to turn,” Wells said as they walked the path towards the church, pea-gravel crunching underfoot.  He pointed out to a grey horizon beyond the pallid winter blue, to where a storm front was building.

“After the sun, the rain,” Eliza added.

“Quite so, Mrs Gray, quite so.  The world keeps turning and we must turn with it.”

 A moment later Wells said to Tayte, “I’ve been wondering what to do about that bible and the letters.  It’s a murder confession after all and I thought perhaps I should show it to the police.  It just seems such a long time ago now.  I shouldn’t think they’d be all that interested.”

“I’m sure they’re going to be very interested,” Tayte said, knowingly, thinking that it was so much more than a past murder confession.  It was the motive for three recent murders, too.

When they came to the church they continued to follow the path around it, keeping it to their right as they walked at an amble towards the bell tower, and Tayte thought that Eliza commanded her walking sticks with great authority and determination as they went.  A gust of wind arrived unannounced.  It stirred what remained of the autumn leaves from hiding and his eyes followed their dance over the headstones in the graveyard until Wells brought them to a stop at the foot of the tower.

“I’ll let you go on without me,” he said.  To Eliza he added, “I’m sure you’d like some time to yourselves.”

“Thank you,” Eliza said.

“It’s easy to find,” Wells added.  He pointed across the graveyard.  “See the circle of angels?  That’s where you’ll find Mena.”

Tayte took Eliza’s arm as they stepped off the path and picked their way across the grass between the burial plots.  It was the kind of graveyard that looked like it had always been there, Tayte thought.  The numerous headstones were nearly all thin and grey, and time had taken their once erect posture and leant them over like old men, whose many words had faded to the point of obscurity beneath their beards of ancient lichens.

“Mena never knew Danny’s real name,” Eliza said.

“No.  I guess she didn’t.”

“Do you know anything about this Victor Montalvo mentioned in Danny’s letter?”

Tayte shook his head.  “That was the first I’d heard of him.”

“Good,” Eliza said.  “I don’t want to know anything more about him.  When I think of Mena, I’ll picture Danny beside her.  I’ll imagine that I came out of their love for each other as Mena had wanted it to be.”

Tayte thought that of all the things to have come out of what happened back then, Eliza was just about the only good thing.  He reminded himself that she had three sons and a daughter, each with children of their own, and that none of them would otherwise have existed today.  And who knew what might come from that branch of her family tree?  GIFT was perhaps another good thing, he supposed, but now that he understood the motive behind its creation, any good that came out of the charity was diminished in his eyes.  Mary had spent her life atoning for her sins and he saw the trust now as little more than her path to salvation.

They came to the statue Wells had directed them to - to the circle of angels that all seemed to be dancing in a ring and smiling at the heavens, as if rejoicing at the unity of one more soul that had found its way home.  Tayte scanned the headstones before it and he was drawn to Mena’s, being of new white marble and the most recent addition to the plot.

“Here she is,” he said, and as he looked at Eliza he could see that her emotions had finally overcome her.  She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and stepped closer.

“In loving memory of Emma Danielson,” she read, her voice low and tremulous.  “My mother,” she added, trying to smile yet succeeding only slightly.

Tayte read over the inscription and thought that no one else would ever know that, or be able to connect Emma Danielson to the Lasseter name.  Any genealogist trying to build the Lasseter family tree after him would draw a blank when they came to hear of Mena, the seventeen year old girl who had run away from home with her little red suitcase at the end of 1944 never to be seen again.  He thought it was perhaps for the better and he thought that was how Mena would have wanted it.

And who could blame her?

There was a trowel in the loose soil at the base of Mena’s headstone, where purple and yellow pansies had been planted.  Eliza surprised Tayte when she went to it.  She dropped her walking sticks and awkwardly knelt on the grass.  Then she picked the trowel up and began to turn the earth over.  Tayte went to her and squatted beside her.  He didn’t know what to make of her actions at first.

“There’s just one more thing to do,” Eliza said.  “Then we can go home.”

She continued to dig at the ground and when she’d finished she set the trowel aside.  She reached into her coat and brought out a thin blue airmail letter.

“I picked it up off the table before we left the house,” she said.  “It was Danny’s letter and it was meant for Mena.  Her mother had no right keeping it from her.”  She placed it gently into the ground and brushed the soil over it with her hands.  “There,” she added.  “Mena has it now and she knows that her Danny was coming back for her.”  She looked up at Tayte, eyes glistening.  “And now she knows his real name so she can find him and they can be together again.”

Tayte put his arm around her.  He leant in and brushed his hand over the soil and helped to pat it flat again.  He hadn’t felt this close to an assignment in a long time, perhaps because Mena’s story hadn’t happened so long ago or perhaps because of its tragic and unjust nature.  Whichever it was, he had a tear in his eye for Mena, too.

He clenched his jaw and sniffed back the cold January air.  He wasn’t a great believer in heaven or hell, or anywhere in between that you couldn’t reach by land, air or sea, but he liked Eliza’s sentiment.  He liked to think that what she’d said over Mena’s grave as she buried Danny’s letter was true: that now Mena knew his real name and what was in his heart, she would find him again.

Epilogue

J
efferson Tayte was back home in Washington DC where he lived in a minimalist one bedroom apartment on tree-lined, North Carolina Avenue.  It was an open-plan bachelor pad with hardwood floors and beige walls, a short walk from Lincoln Park, which was located between the United States Capitol Complex to the east and the Robert F Kennedy Memorial Stadium to the West.  It was a rainy Thursday afternoon, almost a week after he’d returned from England.  He was sitting on his couch drinking coffee and try as he had he still couldn’t shake his last assignment from his head.

It hadn’t helped that Mel Winkelman’s grandson had contacted him that morning, although he’d been expecting him to get in touch.  On his return from England, Tayte had left his contact details on the 82nd Airborne website where he’d previously come across Mel’s photographs from 1944, and now he’d been able to tell his grandson what he’d found out about Danny.  The information had come several years too late for Mel, but Tayte thought his family should know and his grandson had thanked him for the closure it gave them.  That’s what had started Tayte thinking about the assignment again and he was still thinking about it now.

He’d been glad to hear that Eliza Gray was going to keep in touch with Jonathan and his family, and with Jonathan’s and Joan Cartwright’s permission, he’d given Mena’s peace-dollar pendant to Eliza along with the remainder of Danny’s letters.  He hoped they would give her some comfort whenever she thought about Mena and Danny and in many ways they belonged to Eliza now that Mena was gone.

Tayte recalled how upset Joan was when he’d told her what had become of Mena and that he’d found her grave, and she’d been inconsolable when he’d explained to her why Danny couldn’t come back for her.  Joan had immediately blamed herself for having told Mary what she’d heard.  ‘I was always such a gossip,’ she’d said, adding that the significance of her writing to Mary hadn’t occurred to her when she and Tayte had spoken, and why would it?  Neither had known then what consequence it had contributed to.

It wasn’t Joan’s fault.  Tayte had to tell her that several times before she would believe it.  It was no more her fault than it was Mena’s for propagating the lie that Danny was the father of her child, which had only served to compound the confusion between them over what had happened that night at St Peter’s.  Although, with the social stigma around unmarried mothers at the time, Tayte understood why Mena had wanted everyone to believe that Danny, who planned to marry her, was the father of her child.

Tayte sipped his coffee and turned his thoughts to Retha Ingram again.  He supposed that her trial would continue for some time, although the conclusion seemed inevitable given the evidence against her.  He felt no need to follow it further and he imagined that her unwitting act of patricide would only add to her punishment in the years to come.