Downward Facing Death (23 page)

When she heard the bus pull up, Keeley got on it quickly, keeping her head down in case they saw her. The last thing she needed to see was Raquel's smug face as she cozied up with “Benny.”

As she sat at the back of the bus, mercifully alone, Keeley waited for the heavy despondency that had only lifted with her class to settle back over her, tinged this time with the stab of jealousy. It didn't descend. Rather she felt a restless sort of anger, and a desire to do something about the situation. Her café was days away from opening, and she had the Festival to prepare for. Her thoughts of going back to London, of slinking away with the proverbial tail between her legs, had all but evaporated. Damn Ben Taylor, and Raquel. And whoever was apparently trying to scare her away from Belfrey. She had put too much into this to give up now.

There was one thing she did need to do, though, before she could move on, and that was talk to her mother and find out exactly what Edna had meant. No matter how painful the knowledge might be, she needed to know what was lurking in the past before she could fully focus on the future.

As soon as she entered the cottage, she walked over to the house telephone, took a deep breath, sat down, and dialed her mother.

Darla answered on the second ring. “Hello?” She sounded, as usual, impatient.

“Mum, I need to talk to you.”

“Oh, what's happened now?” she snapped in a tone that clearly implied her real meaning was
What have you done now?

“Do you remember a woman called Edna? She's now Gerald Buxby's housekeeper.”

“Is she?” Her mother actually sounded interested. “She wormed her way in there, then. She always had a bit of a thing for him.”

“Never mind that. How well did she know you and Dad?”

Her mother went quiet.

“Not particularly well, really. Where is this going, Keeley?”

“She said that Dad had an affair. Or affairs. That he was unfaithful. Is it true?”

Keeley heard Darla's sharp intake of breath and realized she was holding hers as well. She closed her eyes.
Please say it's not true,
she prayed.

“It's not true,” her mother said firmly. Keeley let her breath out in a long, slow exhale, then promptly sucked it back in at Darla's next words.

“It was me she was talking about, Keeley. I had the affair, not your father. I'm sorry.”

 

Chapter Fifteen

She didn't sound sorry at all. More irritated that Keeley had dared ask.

“You? But when? With who?” Relief made her less angry with her mother than she might have been. She should have known that if either of her parents would do such a thing, it would be the chronically dissatisfied Darla.

“Never mind who. It was a very, very long time ago. Why on earth that woman brought it up now, I have no idea. I hope you haven't been going round upsetting people?”

“Mum, this isn't about me. There shouldn't have been anything to tell.” The anger started to trickle in as she thought of her father, who had tried so hard to make both her and her mother happy, and felt desperately sorry for him. “I take it Dad knew?”

“Of course he knew.”

“Well, half of Belfrey certainly seems to.”

Darla went quiet at that. If anything would bother her mother, it was the idea that people were talking about her in less-than-favorable terms.

There was a long silence. Then hesitantly, in a small voice Keeley couldn't remember her mother ever using before, Darla started to speak.

“It was a very long time ago, Keeley—before you were even born, in fact. We hadn't been married for very long, and I had moved to Belfrey to be with your father. I found it very hard. I missed my friends in London, and I never really fit in in Belfrey.”

Keeley felt a flash of sympathy for her mother then; she knew what
that
was like, but she swallowed it down.

“Why move here, then?” she asked bluntly. “Why not get Dad to move up to you?”

“He had the shop. And I wanted to move, at first. I thought it would be worth it, to be with him. I loved your father very much.”

Keeley, who had been leaning against the arm of the sofa, sat down in surprise.

“You never show it,” she blurted out. “I've never even seen you cry.”

“What good would that do?” Darla said in something like her normal voice. “Crying isn't going to bring him back, now, is it? Besides, I had to be there for you.”

“There for me,” Keeley echoed, thinking she had never heard such a ridiculous phrase in her life. Not once could she remember a cuddle or soft word from her mother, particularly after Dad had died.

But then, that just wasn't Darla's way. Rather she had bullied Keeley out of her stupor of grief until Keeley had gotten up and moved on with her life purely so she could get away from her. It had never occurred to her that the constant nagging might have been the only way Darla knew how to show her concern. And she had paid for her to go to college, and to study classes that Darla had frankly described as a waste of time. Had let her have free rein with her father's shop when she could have just sold it. For the first time, Keeley wondered if she had more reason to be grateful to her mother than she had ever realized.

“You were telling me about the affair,” she said, unwilling to start examining her tangled relationship with Darla right now.

Her mother gave a heavy sigh. “I was young, Keeley, and lonely, and gullible.”
Like me with Brett,
Keeley thought, though it was admittedly very different circumstances. Her mother continued. “It didn't go on for very long—the guilt was too much. I told him in the end, and, well, it was awful.” Keeley was sure she heard Darla's words catch in her throat, as though suppressing a sob, but told herself she must be imagining things. Hadn't her mother just admitted she never cried? But there was no denying the tremor in her voice as she went on.

“He threw me out. That's the only time I ever saw your father really angry. He threw me out, and I went back to London.”

“You actually broke up?” Keeley found herself fascinated by this story of her parents' marriage, of events that had occurred before she even existed. Tried to imagine her mother young and vulnerable, and failed.

“Yes, for some time. I wrote to him, called him, even got my friends to call him, but he wouldn't speak to me. I was on the verge of giving up when he turned up at my parents' house one day, a bunch of flowers in one hand. ‘Darla Carpenter,' he said, ‘you had better be getting your bottom back home this minute.' I threw myself at him so hard, I nearly knocked him over. By the time we got back to Belfrey, I was pregnant with you. Although we didn't know that for a while.”

Keeley felt stunned. Whatever she had been expecting to discover from the dreaded conversation, it wasn't this. Trust her mother to manage to frame her infidelity in some kind of positive light.

“Well, that's lovely,” she said, trying not to sound sarcastic but not entirely succeeding, “but what about when you came back? Why does everyone know?”

“Everyone meaning who?” Darla said, her tone sharp.

“Edna, obviously, so I suppose Gerald. I asked Jack Tibbons, and he wouldn't tell me anything, but he knew.”

“Keeley Carpenter,” her mother said in that voice that had always cowed her as a child, “I'd thank you not to go around Belfrey asking about my past indiscretions. They would know because they were your father's friends, I suppose. Really, it should be forgotten about now. But then, Edna never liked me.”

Keeley had a sudden, horrible thought. “Did Terry Smith know?”

“The man who died?” Darla sounded puzzled. “I shouldn't have thought so. Why?”

There was something nagging at the back of her consciousness, something her mind just couldn't get a grasp on, but for some reason, her mother's revelation felt significant.

“Apparently,” Keeley said, trying to sound as if she had come by the information quite by chance, as though it were common knowledge, “the police believe Terry was killed because he was blackmailing people. Discovering their secrets and extorting money out of them not to reveal whatever they were hiding.”

“That's got nothing to do with me. Goodness, it was nearly thirty years ago, Keeley. And as you've discovered, it's hardly a secret.”

But what about the other person? she thought to herself. Had they too been married, with a family?

“Who was it?”

Her mother gave a light laugh, a noise Keeley recognized. It meant she was going to ignore whatever you had just said to her, because she had no intention of responding.

“No one important. No one you know.”

“No one from Belfrey?”

“No,” her mother said, a note of finality in her voice. Keeley felt that Darla was still hiding something, or at least telling her as little as possible, but she also knew her mother wasn't going to be drawn out any further. She dropped it, at least for now. There were other questions she wanted to ask about her parents' history, but she had gotten as much as she was going to out of Darla for one day. It was the most honest conversation she could ever remember having with her mother.

Darla took the lull in conversation as an opportunity to change the subject, asking Keeley instead about the café and opening day. After making it clear she held Keeley fully responsible for ensuring it turned a profit within the first year, she rung off, leaving Keeley staring at the telephone, wondering what had just happened. So she did what she often did when struggling to process events or emotions.

She cooked.

With the food festival fast approaching, it was a necessity in any case, and so she threw herself into washing and chopping vegetables and fruits. Tomorrow she would give herself the best part of the day to make up her recipes and ensure everything was perfect. Being as it was a festival stall, she wouldn't be able to make too many main dishes for practical reasons and so had decided to go with one main dish as a showcase and a basic recipe for veggie burgers that she could then serve with fresh bread rolls and her favorite rainbow salad from her proposed salad bar for the Yoga Café. It had occurred to her that desserts were always a crowd pleaser, and so she had decided to make up a summer fruit ice cream that could be kept in her cool box for the day and would hopefully attract the children; and for her main dish, she was going with a spicy root curry. It was a bit of a gamble, as she hadn't used the exact recipe before, but Keeley thought it a better option than the moussaka, as curry was a dish that tended to taste better the day after, when the spices had had chance to fully develop and were at their most flavorsome. For a while, as she immersed herself in her work, her recent worries receded. She was aware she should be angry at her mother, but for reasons she wasn't quite ready to fully explore, her overwhelming feeling was one of relief.

Cooking, she mused and had often thought before, was in many ways a type of practice of yoga. The central point of yoga, as her teachers had taught her and she tried to impart to her own students, was not just to relieve a backache or get thinner thighs—as nice as that thought was—but to experience a union of body and mind. A sensation of being in the moment, or being in flow, that one sometimes heard athletes or artists talk about. For Keeley, cooking often had the same effect. At the ashram in India, cooking was considered an act of
seva
as much as teaching or offering help and kindness, and as Keeley washed and chopped, she tried to imagine people eating and enjoying her food, without worrying about whether or not the café turned a profit or she would ever feel accepted back in Belfrey. Or the killer would ever be caught. Or if Ben Taylor would ever kiss her again.

After she had finished for the night, she made herself a comforting carrot and coriander soup, taking the time to say grace over it before she tucked in, and went to bed feeling rather more serene. Talking to Darla had, she felt, restored some kind of balance, albeit a tenuous one.

She started the next day with a vigorous yoga practice and then walked up to the Glovers' farm, trying not to hope that Ted Glover would be nowhere to be seen. A sign advertised fresh free-range eggs and milk, and Keeley smiled to herself at the expression “free-range,” guessing that Diana had written the sign. The Glovers indeed ran a free-range farm, which chimed with Keeley's attitude toward ethical eating, but they had done so for decades, out of tradition, before ever “free-range” was part of the public consciousness, and given Ted's obvious hatred for “hippie types,” the use of the term seemed incongruous.

As she had hoped, Ted was somewhere out on the farm proper, and only Diana was present up at the farmhouse. She was delighted by Keeley's idea to use fresh produce in her recipes, and when Keeley told her she intended to use their milk for the ice cream for the food festival, Diana beamed with pride.

“It might cheer Ted up a bit, at least,” she said in a bright voice, though a shadow that Keeley pretended not to see passed over her face at the mention of her husband's name.

She then popped into Annie's to enlist her help for the next day, then went back to Rose Cottage to get on with her preparation. The afternoon flew by, and it was well into the evening before she was finished, and then she had the cleaning up of her own chaotic kitchen to do. Finally, she stepped back and surveyed her handiwork with a satisfied sigh.

If ever a girl deserved a glass of wine, she decided, it was now.

*   *   *

Reaching the Baker's Inn, Keeley nearly changed her mind about going in, then squared her shoulders and stepped inside. As usual, every head in the bar turned, but this time, there were a few friendly nods and Keeley walked to the bar with a little more confidence. The barman served her with a distinct lack of interest, and she took her glass of wine over to a table in the corner, feeling almost disappointed when no one attempted to talk to her or question her. She almost wished Duane were there.