Two If by Sea (16 page)

“Kate Bellingham called,” Hope told Frank as he swung down from the truck on that bright, unseasonably tender Monday morning.

“Cedric and Tura's Kate?”

Through her nose, Hope chuffed in the exasperated way that women all over the world were, at that moment, doing in response to men who needed to verbally verify the obvious. “She needs you to call her back.”

“That's fine. It's what, ten at night there. It must be Cedric. I'm sure he's sick. A stroke or something. I hope it's not worse than that.”

Hope's uncharacteristically pale face went still, her gaze dark and fixed. “I think it is even worse than that, Frank. Something in that girl's voice was dire.”

“I'm going to grab a bite of breakfast first, Mom. You used to say, bad news always keeps.”

“Don't quote me to my own face, Frank,” Hope said. “I'm not psychic but I heard it in her voice. Call now.”

The pad on which she'd written the number of Tura Farms was propped against the phone. Gingerly, Frank lifted the receiver. He knew that Cedric must be ill . . . and hoped he was alive, but he didn't want to know the details. The
brrrr
of the telephone on the other end was interrupted on the first ring.

“Frank,” Kate said. No greeting. No brisk hello.

“Yes.”

“This is Kate Bellingham. Now Kate Piper. I got married.”

“That's wonderful, Kate.” He paused. “I had actually heard about this. I spoke to your dad ten days ago and he said congratulations were in order . . .”

“Mum and Dad are dead, Frank.”

If he had heard a message of death in his life, he'd heard two hundred, and they seemed to be his personal coin in recent times. Still, he sat down hard at the frilly little table where Hope did her “telephoning,” always with a list, and a pen for notes, as formal as a Jane Austen matron. Squeezed into the desk's embrace, he felt like a toad on a velvet pillow. “Kate, I am so sorry for your loss. I . . . I hate this.”

“Thank you.”

“How can this be? Both of them? May I ask, was there a . . . fire? Or did they wreck the car?”

“Frank, they were murdered.” Kate began to cry, a hoarse, harsh caw. “They died last night. Sometime after midnight. It's difficult to tell. The weather is warm. The police have been here all day. And I somehow forgot that you didn't know. I forgot that you didn't already
know
, until just now!” Kate began to cry louder. The phone was muffled as it dropped, and then passed from hand to hand.

Finally, a sharpish, prim young woman's voice spoke up. “Mr. Mercy? This is Detective Inspector Rosemary O'Connell.”

“Hello, ma'am.”

“You were acquainted with the Bellinghams.”

“Very well. I lived at Tura Farms for nearly three years.”

“Of course it would be best if you were here . . .” Not for me, Frank thought. Not with you. “But perhaps you can help us answer a few questions.”

“I'll do anything I can. The Bellinghams are, well, they were, very dear to me. But may I ask, first, was this a personal killing? Or a robbery that went wrong? A home invasion?”

“I'd like to ask the questions at this point, if I may. This is a new investigation. I can't share it at that level of detail even if I knew it.”

“I'm sorry. Old habits.”

“Katherine Piper told me you had been a police officer.” Kate, married to the bounder Tura had said so long ago would never put a ring on her hand. It was good she was married, now having to withstand such rough weather. “Mr. Mercy, this is a very upsetting business, and mine should be the apology. I will say that the Bellinghams appear to have been asleep, or at least in bed, when someone entered their home. There were tire marks down by the gate, many kinds, and no footprints in the house at all . . .” Frank thought, Then they were pros. But why? “No sign of forced entry.”

“They leave it open. They don't lock.”

“Kate wasn't sure. As you can imagine, she's distraught. She doesn't come out here every day.”

“How did she find out about the murder?” Frank said.

“There were three text messages in quick sequence to Kate's mobile phone. All the same words. ‘Go look after your parents.' The mobile that the messages came from was a disposable. It hasn't been found.”

“Sure.”

“She wasn't sure about the precise arrangement of her parents' things either. Did they keep valuables? That you observed?”

“Cedric had a converted cabinet next to the refrigerator. It looked like an ordinary cabinet door, the kind where you might keep food in cans . . . er, tins, or vitamins. They did keep tins in there, and a spice rack, I think. But there was a safe in the back, behind the tins, a big cavity where they kept their papers, and Cedric had an old dueling pistol, that didn't work, the horses' papers . . .”

“Yes.”

“I think they also kept some cash there.”

DCI O'Connell said, “I will tell you this in confidence. All that is still there. More than ten thousand in cash. And what appear to be antique coins. The safe was closed, although the tins of food were removed. There seems to be nothing missing of any value. The odd thing is what was indeed missing.”

“What?”

“Well, there were photos. Those are gone. They were hung on the wall, all in identical frames.” Frank saw them now, Tura's wall of photos, in scrolly, expensive brass frames. He was there, in the old high-ceilinged timbered Queenslander kitchen, the welcome night breeze ruffling off the hills, the red crackle of a winter sunset announcing a perfect winter night in July. He could see Tura as he had seen her dozens of times, her hair in wisps from the elaborate Edwardian confection she rolled each morning before she came downstairs, a style that Hope, when she met Tura at Frank's wedding, called a “Gibson girl.” Dressed for a movie set rather than a dusty pitch, she would be cheerfully whipping up some mess featuring perfectly good sausages ruined by one of her preternaturally bad sauces, slicing the thick bread, brewing the sweet strong tea. Cedric's eyes sought her out as he banged in at the vestibule door, the pipe with nothing in it clenched in his strong, square teeth; he'd be wearing a flannel shirt and his leather cap, despite it being seventy degrees. Frank wanted to weep.

Gone, all gone, the entirety of his world on the other side of the world—Natalie gone, and now Ceddie and Tura gone, a ruthless tide.

“There were photos of Mr. Bellingham's horses, including one that Kate says is now yours . . .” DCI O'Connell was saying, and, suddenly, Frank's hands chilled around the phone receiver. “And she seems to think there was also a picture of the whole group of you, also taken before you left. All those photos are gone. And the guest bedroom was torn apart, with a fury, children's old clothes scattered all over, the mattress tipped off the bed. Same thing with the bedroom in the farmhand's cottage. But that's all. Not another thing disturbed. Why would you think this would happen, Mr. Mercy?”

The tock of the clock on his mother's wall grew louder, a small hammer against Frank's brain. He said, “I have a copy of that same photo. It's here in my room. It was taken up on the hill where there is a grave and a big gum tree. My wife, Dr. Natalie Donovan, died in the tsunami, and she's buried there with most of her family.”

Ian had been in that photo.

“Oy, Westbridge,” O'Connell said to someone else, evidently in the room. “You take Mrs. Piper up and show her the albums. See if she can pick out a face, anyone who did work here for a short time. Anyone at all,” O'Connell said, evidently speaking to another cop. Then she continued. “It was a nasty business. An execution. Their throats were cut. No weapon. No trail of blood.”

Pros, Frank thought again. They leave no marks. Frank touched his cheek. The skin of his face had gone cold and stiff.

“I would like to give you my number if you can think of anyone, anyone at all, who might have had a grudge against the Bellinghams, for any reason.”

Frank said, “I only knew them for three years, but in that time, I can tell you now that there was no one. They were not only well liked, but beloved.”

Rosemary O'Connell said, “Not by everyone.”

Frank wanted to shout, This had nothing to do with Tura or Cedric! Saying so would help nothing, though, and no one would ever be arrested for murdering the Bellinghams, this much Frank knew for certain. He asked to speak to Kate again, and when she came back on the line, he murmured his intention to book right away to come out for the funeral, his muscles tensing as he willed her to refuse him.

“Thank you, Frank, but I'm not going to do that. Mum and Dad weren't religious, and the way things happened, it would be too awful to drag it out. As it is, we have reporters buzzing around us all day. We just hope the publicity will smoke out whoever did this, and the law will be all over him. It had to be a mistake, didn't it, Frank? They were looking for someone else, and my poor parents just got in their way?”

Frank said, “I'm sure you're right, Kate.” Hope reached out and squeezed Frank's shoulder, her face crumpled with concern. Bright sun burst in at the windows. “This didn't have anything to do with your parents and the good lives they led.”

There were ways to kill people and other ways to kill people. A bullet in the back of the skull was swift and painless, its sound a negligible concern at a place as far from the closest neighboring ranch as Rhode Island was from Manhattan. Cutting a throat was not only cruel, it was meant to be a message of terror to those who survived. The texts to Kate were meant to be a message as well: she had not looked after her parents. Whoever had come in the night to break Cedric and Tura's sleep with a harsher sleep had not come looking for valuables but for information about the American man they'd had the sad fortune to employ, then to know and love as a surrogate son. They had come because Frank had something they wanted, in the person of a miraculous child. Were the killers part of Ian's rightful family, simply trying to claim him back? Frank's intuition told him no, something else was going on. He didn't understand what it was.

He would have been willing to bet that the old couple, one as gentle and stern as the other, refused to offer up one word about Frank or Ian—even when promised that one word would save them.

They would have known even that their refusal was in vain.

Frank knew it, too.

•  •  •

A thick envelope containing a photocopy of a land deed arrived just three weeks later with a long letter from Kate. The wills had been read. Cedric had his own will. Tura had hers. They had one together, also, and the joint will was recent, just months old.

Dear Frank,

I didn't know you well, but I do know that Mum and Dad loved you as a son. Hence you will understand that they wanted to remember you in their will. Enclosed you will find the nature of their remembrance, which may puzzle you. It did puzzle me. But Mum and Dad had their own ways, of course.

It has been a very hard time.

Dad's leg bothered him more than it did once, but he had years left in him, and Mum was as strong as houses. The police think the fellow must have wanted the frames or something, because they were handmade, very expensive, from a local coppersmith. This has been a long time of tragedy. First Miles and your wife and her family, now my parents. Life presses down upon me with its brutality. Fen and I will have a child in the next few months, and I'm afraid to bring a child into this world. I wish my parents could have seen their first grandchild, a little girl.

The letter continued.

Kate was selling the swath of dry, hilly, yet somehow verdant land that had been Tura Farms. Forty of the best acres had been platted out for a house that she would one day build. That land included two acres of hilltop comprising the consecrated ground where Cedric and Tura now lay with the Donovans—and where several dozen other plots would be ruled off for family.

Frank thought of the morning of the tsunami, the radio preacher's voice blasting out the warning, “For you do not know the day nor the hour.”

The rest of Tura Farms was slated to go to a “nice” developer. It made Frank wince to think of what
nice
meant in this context, one-acre houses on one-acre parcels, side by side on the hills where Tura and Cedric's horses had lifted their heads to the wind.

There were also bequests of money, in trust, because Tura, who saw to the books, had been frugal and canny with cash. Here began the puzzles, according to Kate, who hastened to point out she felt no rancor about any of these choices. Tura and Cedric had left the portion that would have gone to Miles, more than twenty thousand pounds, to Frank—who would have instantly refused it except it was in trust for Ian Smith Donovan Mercy.

In her own testament, Tura had left Frank her own home, the breeding farm called Stone Pastures, that included a five-bedroom stone house in Yorkshire, with two housekeeping wings, each with another bedroom and bath, and a carriage building and some eighty acres of hillocky moorland fields, near a small village called Stead. Kate explained that it was still in the name given Tura when she was born, Kathleen Tura Claidy. Kate assured Frank that her mother's instructions carefully pointed out that the farm manager, like his father and his grandfather before him, was a very astute breeder, but that Frank might want to choose his own. A separate addendum laid out the manager's salary, his schedule of bonuses and what would prompt one, with funds set aside for five years for that purpose. In a handwritten note, Tura pointed out that the caretaker regularly saw to the swallows on the roof and kept the gutters and lawns up, and that the place was cleaned once a month down to the linens, should Frank wish to visit, as Tura was sure he would. She gave Frank all this with her abundant love and the wry hope that Frank would be seventy when he signed the papers receiving Stone Pastures as his own.