1 Aunt Bessie Assumes (3 page)

“Yes, well, I’m sure I can find something
for you put on that will be more suitable for being out and about in this
weather,” Bessie replied.
 

They finished their tea in silence, Vikky
nibbling her way through half a dozen biscuits, and then Bessie and her guest
headed upstairs.
 
Bessie had always
been slender, and she wasn’t about to let age become an excuse for letting her
figure go.
 
She should have plenty
of things that would fit the young widow.
 
Unfortunately, Vikky was several inches taller than she was, so any
trousers that she lent her were going to be rather short on her.
 

Vikky sat on the edge of Bessie’s bed,
marvelling at the pink walls and the plethora of cuddly toys that filled every
spare space in the room.

“Why do you have so many cuddly toys?”
Vikky asked after a moment.

“I never experienced the joy of having
children of my own,” Bessie told her as she dug through her wardrobe.
 
“I’ve been fortunate, however, in that
many of the children in the area have adopted me as an honorary auntie.
 
For some reason that seems to include
buying me cuddly toys at every opportunity.
 
I suppose I don’t have to keep them all,
but I could never find a reason to part with any of them.”

Bessie grabbed a long tweed skirt and a
large woollen sweater from the wardrobe.
 
She also found a pair of thick tights that were size “extra-tall” which
she had purchased by mistake.
 
After
a moment’s hesitation, she added a pair of plain white cotton underpants to the
pile.
 
No doubt the other woman had
never worn anything so ordinary, but at least they would be comfortable.
 

“Here you are.
 
It’s the best I can do.”
 
Bessie handed the clothes to Vikky who
stood up and dropped the police blanket she had still been clutching around
herself.
 
“Cool, I can look like
somebody’s old auntie,” Vikky muttered as she flipped through the clothes.

“Feel free to stay in your nightie,”
Bessie replied coolly.
 

“Oh, no,” the woman backtracked
quickly.
 
“I didn’t mean to sound
ungrateful,” she insisted.
 
“Everything is just too much today.
  
I’m sure I must be behaving very
badly.”

Bessie resisted the temptation to agree
with her.
 
“I should let you get
changed then,” Bessie suggested, heading towards the door.

As she turned back towards Vikky, she was
shocked to see the other woman had already pulled off her nightie and was
climbing into the borrowed underwear.
 
Apparently modesty belonged to a different generation, Bessie thought as
she made her way into the hall to wait for Vikky to finish.

Vikky followed her out of the room only
seconds later, and the pair made their way back downstairs.
 
Now Bessie led her guest into the small sitting
room that was next door to the kitchen.
 

“Please have a seat; we might as well be
comfortable while we wait for the police to arrive.”

“Yes, I guess so,” Vikky said
hesitantly.
 
“Maybe I should go down
and talk to them there,” she suggested.

“I’m sure you’d just be in the way,”
Bessie told her.
 

“You were going to tell me what happened
to your lover,” Vikky suddenly remembered.
 

“We weren’t lovers,” Bessie said
primly.
 
“We were in love.”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean anything,” Vikky
waved a hand.
 
“Anyway, what happened?”

Bessie smiled grimly at Vikky.
 
She was prepared to tell the story, but
she was determined, in exchange, to find out some things about her guest as
well.
 

“My family moved to America when I was
just a baby, really,” she began.
 
“Then, after fifteen years there, they decided to move back to the
island.
 
I had fallen madly in love
with a man I met through a friend, but my parents wouldn’t let me stay behind
with him.
 
They made me leave him
when they returned to the island.”

“That’s awful.
 
You shouldn’t have gone with them,”
Vikky told her.

“I was under eighteen; I couldn’t have
stayed on my own.
 
Anyway, this was
a great many years ago.
 
Children
obeyed their parents in those days.”

Vikky snorted.
 
“You wouldn’t catch me leaving a man I
loved just because my parents said I had to,” she insisted.

“Yes, well, as I said, the times were very
different then,” Bessie said patiently.

“So they dragged you back here and you
bought this cottage?” Vikky checked that she understood the story.

“There was a bit more to it than that,”
Bessie told her.
 
“Matthew, that was
the man I loved, decided to come and get me.”

“Good on him!” Vikky shouted.

“Yes, well, unfortunately for him he fell
ill on the journey here and died just before his ship docked in Liverpool.”

“He was sailing?
 
Why didn’t he just fly over?”

“There weren’t any commercial transatlantic
flights in those days.”
 
Bessie
shook her head.
 
“And even if there
had been, tickets probably would have been far too expensive for someone like
Matthew to afford.”

“So then you bought the cottage?” Vikky
asked.

“Yes,” Bessie nodded.
 
“Matthew wrote a new will just before he
left America, leaving everything he owned to me.
 
It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was
enough to buy this cottage, which was much smaller in those days.
 
I’ve extended it twice, you see.”

 
“It must have been pretty small,” Vikky
said, looking around the space.

“It was really only two rooms when I
bought it,” Bessie told her.
 

“Danny’s family’s cottage is huge,” Vikky
replied.
 
“It has separate wings for
staff and stuff like that.”

“From what I’ve heard, Danny’s family has
a great deal of money.”

“Yeah, they own a bunch of stuff like
grocery stores and shopping malls,” Vikky shrugged.
 
“I loved Danny because he was a good
person, not because he was loaded.”

“That’s good to know,” Bessie said, forcing
herself
to keep the doubt out of her tone.
 
“So now that he’s gone, who inherits his
share of the fortune?” she asked boldly.

“Me,” Vikky giggled.
 
Bessie couldn’t keep the shocked
expression off her face.
 

“Oh dear, that didn’t sound good, did it?”
Vikky shook her head.
 
“I’m just so
confused.
 
I can’t even begin to believe
that Danny’s gone.
 
He was always so
much more serious than I was.
 
He
insisted that we rewrite our wills just before the wedding.
 
I guess that means I’m going to be a
very rich widow.”

With those words Vikky burst into tears
again.
 
Bessie sighed as she got up
to find another box of tissues.
 
Perhaps it had something to do with the generation gap, but she was
finding it very difficult to muster up any sympathy for this woman.

The day wore on and, as Bessie made
frequent trips to the kitchen for more tissues and endless cups of tea, she could
just see the tented area where the police were busily going about their
work.
 
The rain finally stopped altogether
and even the wind slackened as morning turned to afternoon.
 

Bessie offered the use of her phone to
Vikky, if she wanted to call anyone, but she demurred.
 

“I don’t want to break the news to Danny’s
parents myself and I can’t begin to explain anything.
 
I just want to sit here and feel numb.”

Bessie made soup with tea and toast for
lunch, which they ate at the kitchen table.
 
“You need to try to eat something,” she
told Vikky when she shook her head at the soup.

“I’m just not hungry,” Vikky moaned.
  
“How can I eat when I know that
Danny is….
”

“You have to keep your strength up,”
Bessie counselled her.
 
“The next
few days are going to be difficult; you need to stay strong.”
 

She knew she was a fine one to talk.
 
When she found out that Matthew had
died, she had refused to eat for nearly a week, sobbing almost continually and
only sleeping when her body gave in to exhaustion.
 
But she didn’t need to tell Vikky any of
that.
 
With one more final urging,
the younger woman fell on the soup and toast as if she hadn’t eaten in
days.
 
Within minutes, half a loaf
of bread was gone and Vikky was halfway through a third bowl of soup.

“You were right,” she told the older woman
as she emptied the bowl the third time.
 
“I really needed that.”

Bessie bit her tongue and looked out the
window at the activity further down the beach.
 
The police vehicles that were parked in
her driveway and along the road next to her house had been coming and going
throughout the morning.
 
When Bessie
spotted the ambulance that arrived shortly after lunch, she quickly moved her
guest upstairs and away from any chance to watch her husband’s body being
removed.

“I have an office up here,” she told Vikky
as she ushered her upstairs.
 
“And I
have a lot of books.
 
Maybe you’d
like to read while you wait.”

Vikky wrinkled her nose.
 
“I’m not really much of a reader,” she
replied.
 
“Where’s your telly?”

Bessie fought back a frown.
 
“I don’t have a telly.”

“Too cheap to pay the licence fee?” Vikky
snorted.
 

Bessie bit back a dozen angry
replies.
 
After several deep breaths,
she finally spoke.
 
“Television has
simply never interested me,” she told the woman, keeping her tone as even as
she could manage.
 
“Money is not an
issue.”

“What did you do before you retired?” Vikky
asked.

Bessie bristled.
 
This woman was unbelievably rude.
 
“I don’t believe that’s any of your
business,” she couldn’t stop herself from saying.

Vikky looked stung.
 
“Oh, am I prying now?
 
I thought, since we talked about my
marriage and your dead boyfriend and whatever that we could talk about
stuff.
 
Never mind.”

Bessie was saved from having to reply by a
loud knock on her door.
 
The two
women hurried down the stairs, both welcoming the interruption.

Hugh Watterson stood at Bessie’s
door.
 
The rain had stopped some
time earlier but Hugh, who had been out in it for hours, was still almost dripping
wet.
 
He forced himself to smile at
the two women.

“Inspector Rockwell has asked me to
collect Mrs. Pierce and bring her over to the station.
 
He needs to talk to her and he felt that
the station was the best place.”
 
Bessie
grinned at the look on Hugh’s face as he looked into her cosy kitchen.
 
No doubt it would be hours before he
could get changed out of his wet clothes and relax.

“I don’t want to go to the police
station,” Vikky protested.
 
“It
isn’t like I’ve done anything wrong.”

“No, ma’am, of course not,” Hugh was quick
to agree.
 
“But the Inspector wants
to get right to interviewing
susp…,
er,
witnesses.
 
He’s gone back to the
station and asked me to bring you.
 
Other constables have been sent to gather up the rest of the victim’s
family.”

“You’re going to bring Danny’s parents to
the police station?
 
It’s worth
going just to see that.”
 
Vikky
laughed now and looked around.
 
“I
didn’t even have my bag or my phone, did I?” she said to Bessie.

“You didn’t bring anything with you,”
Bessie assured her.
 
“As for what
you were wearing when you arrived, well, I’ll drop that off to you another
day.
 
You don’t want to be worrying
about it all afternoon.”

“Thank you.”
 
Vikky didn’t seem to be paying much
attention to Bessie.
 
She was
staring down the beach, where teams of uniformed constables were slowly walking
along the sand, studying every inch of it.
 
Bessie could see that the tent was still standing, but it was obvious
that the body had been removed.