Water Like a Stone

December

Gemma James would never have thought that two adults, two children, and two dogs, all crammed into a small car along with a week’s worth of luggage and assorted Christmas presents, could produce such a palpable silence.

It was Christmas Eve, and they’d left London as soon as she and her partner, Duncan Kincaid, could get away from their respective offices, his at New Scotland Yard, hers at the Notting Hill Division of the Metropolitan Police. They had both managed a long-overdue week’s break from their jobs and were on their way to spend the holiday with Duncan’s family in Cheshire, a prospect that Gemma viewed with more than a little trepidation.

In the backseat, her five-year-old son, Toby, had at last fallen asleep, his blond head tilted to one side, his small body sagging against the seat belt with the abandon managed only by the very young. Geordie, Gemma’s cocker spaniel, was sprawled half in the boy’s lap, snoring slightly.

Next to Toby sat Kit, Duncan’s thirteen-year-old, with his little terrier, Tess, curled up beside him. Unlike Toby, Kit was awake and ominously quiet. Their anticipated holiday had begun with a
row, and Kit had shown no inclination to put his sense of injury aside.

Gemma sighed involuntarily, and Kincaid glanced at her from the passenger seat.

“Ready for a break?” he asked. “I’d be glad to take over.”

As a single fat raindrop splashed against the windscreen and crawled up the glass, Gemma saw that the heavy clouds to the north had sunk down to the horizon and were fast obliterating the last of the daylight. They’d crawled up the M6 past Birmingham in a stop-and-start queue of holiday traffic, and only now were they getting up to a decent speed. “I think there’s one more stop before we leave the motorway. We can switch there.” Reluctant as she was to stop, Gemma had no desire to navigate her way through the wilds of Cheshire in the dark.

“Nantwich is less than ten miles from the motorway,” Kincaid said with a grin, answering her unspoken thought.

“It’s still country in between.” Gemma made a face. “Cows. Mud. Manure. Bugs.”

“No bugs this time of year,” he corrected.

“Besides,” Gemma continued, undeterred, “your parents don’t live in the town. They live on a
farm
.” The word was weighted with horror.

“It’s not a working farm,” Kincaid said, as if that made all the difference. “Although there is a dairy next door, and sometimes the smell does tend to drift a bit.”

His parents owned a bookshop in the market town of Nantwich, but lived in an old farmhouse a few miles to the north. Kincaid had grown up there, along with his younger sister, Juliet, and as long as Gemma had known him he’d talked about the place as if it were heaven on earth.

By contrast, having grown up in North London, Gemma never felt really comfortable out of range of lights and people, and she wasn’t buying his glowing advertisements for country life. Nor was
she thrilled about leaving their home. She had so looked forward to a Christmas unmarred by the calamities that had shadowed last year’s holidays, their first in the Notting Hill house. And she felt the children needed the security of a Christmas at home, especially Kit.

Especially Kit. She glanced in the rearview mirror. He hadn’t joined in their banter, and his face was still and implacable as he gazed out the window at the rolling Cheshire hills.

That morning, as Gemma had attempted a last-minute sort through a week’s worth of neglected post, she’d come across a letter addressed to Kincaid and bearing Kit’s school insignia. She’d ripped it open absently, expecting a fund-raising request or an announcement of some school activity. Then she’d stood in the kitchen, frozen with shock as she scanned the contents. It was from Kit’s head teacher, informing Kincaid of her concern over the recent drop in Kit’s academic performance and requesting that he schedule a conference after the holiday. Previous notes sent home with Kit by his teachers, the head had added, had come back with signatures the staff suspected had been forged.

Gemma had waited with tight-lipped restraint until Kincaid got home, then they’d confronted Kit together.

Things had not gone well. Kincaid, his anger fueled as much by Kit’s duplicity as by concern over the boy’s school performance, had shouted at his son while Toby and the dogs had cowered in the background. Kit had gone white and balled into himself as defensively as a threatened hedgehog, and Gemma found herself the peacemaker.

“It’s too late to ring the head now,” she’d said. “We’ll have to wait until term takes up again after the holidays. Why don’t we all calm down and not let this spoil our trip.” Glancing at her watch, she added, “And if we don’t get off soon, we’ll never make it to your parents’ in time for tonight’s dinner.”

Kincaid had turned away with a shrug of disgust to load the last of the luggage, and Kit had retreated into the stony silence he’d maintained since. It was ironic, Gemma thought, that although it
was Kit who’d been called on the carpet, she felt that she and Duncan were the ones who had failed. They should have discussed how to handle things before they talked to Kit; perhaps they should even have spoken to the head teacher before tackling the boy.

Having recently come to at least a temporary resolution in the custody battle with Kit’s maternal grandparents that had consumed much of their last year, they’d allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security. Kit had at last agreed to have his DNA tested, and when a match proved Duncan was his biological father, the court had awarded him custody dependent on the continuing evaluation of the boy’s well-being and the stability of his home life.

They should have known better than to take that achievement for granted, Gemma thought. It was too easy, and with Kit, things were never going to be easy. A simple paternity test was not going to magically erase the damage he’d suffered from his mother’s death and his stepfather’s abandonment.

As she glanced at Kincaid sitting beside her, she guessed his uncharacteristic display of anger stemmed from the fear that they might lose everything they had gained.

A rustle and a yawn came from the backseat. “Are we there yet?” piped up Toby. “I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry, sport,” Kincaid answered. “And we’re close. Just a bit longer.”

“Will Grandma Rosemary have mince pies for us?” Toby, as always, had jumped from a sound sleep to a high-energy state of alertness.

Gemma found it both amusing and touching that Toby, who had never met Duncan’s parents, had adopted them as comfortably as if they were his own family, while she, who had at least met Duncan’s mother once, felt as if she was facing a root canal. What if they didn’t like her? What if she didn’t live up to their expectations for their son? Kit’s mother, after all, had been an academic, a well-respected
Cambridge don, while Gemma had gone straight from secondary school into the police academy, and no one in her family had ever graduated from university. Her parents were bakers, not intellectuals, and her mother’s most literary endeavor was an addiction to
Coronation Street
.

“Yes, lots and lots of mince pies,” answered Kincaid. “And turkey tomorrow for Christmas dinner.”

“What about tonight? I’m hungry tonight.” Toby leaned as far forward as his seat belt allowed, his eyes wide with interest.

“Your auntie Jules is cooking tonight’s dinner, I think, so you’ll just have to be patient. And polite,” Kincaid added, sounding a little uneasy. He didn’t often talk about his sister, and Gemma knew he hadn’t seen Juliet or his niece and nephew since the Christmas before last.

Toby drummed the toes of his shoes into the back of Gemma’s seat. “Why? Can’t she cook?”

“Um, she was always better at making things with her hands when she was a little girl,” Kincaid said diplomatically. “But, hey, if Gemma can learn to cook, anything is possible.”

Without taking her eyes off the road, Gemma smacked him on the arm. “Watch it, mate, or you’ll get worms in your food from now on.” Toby cackled, and to Gemma’s relief, she thought she heard a faint snicker from Kit.

“How is Father Christmas going to find me if I’m not at home?” asked Toby. “Will I have a stocking?”

“Don’t be such a baby,” said Kit. “You know there’s—”

“Kit, that’s enough,” Kincaid said sharply, and the slight rapport of a moment ago vanished instantly.

Gemma swore under her breath and gripped the steering wheel a bit tighter, but before she could think how to mend the breach, Toby shouted, “Look, Mummy, it’s snowing. It’s going to be a white Christmas!”

The large flakes drifted into the windscreen one by one, light as
feathers, then came more thickly, until the swirling mist of white filled Gemma’s vision.

“A white Christmas,” Kit repeated from the backseat, his voice flat with sarcasm. “Oh, joy.”

“Bloody Caspar.” Juliet Newcombe swung the pick hard into the three-foot swath of mortar in the wall of the old dairy barn. “Bloody Piers.” She swung again, with equal force, enlarging the hole left by her first blow.

The light was fading fast, and the bitterly cold wind blowing off the canal held the metallic scent that presaged snow. She’d sent her crew home hours earlier, to spend Christmas Eve with their families, and it was only her stubbornness and her fury that had kept her on at the building site long past knocking-off time.

Not that she didn’t have a good reason for working late. The conversion of the old dairy barn on the Shropshire Union Canal, between Nantwich and Barbridge, was the largest commission she’d landed since striking out on her own in the building business, and a spate of unseasonably bad weather earlier in the month had thrown the project weeks behind schedule. She leaned on her pick for a moment, surveying the progress they
had
made.

Set where the gentle sweep of pasture met the canal, the place would be a small gem when it was finished. The building was a single story, constructed of traditional Cheshire redbrick, and slate roofed. At some point in its history, outbuildings had been added to the original single-roomed barn so that the structure now formed a U, with the wings facing the pasture. The main building hugged the edge of the Cut, and the windows they’d set into the frontage gave a wide view of the water and of the arch of the old stone bridge that crossed it.

Of the half dozen narrowboats moored below the bridge, only one sported a welcoming light and a wisp of smoke from its chimney.
Perhaps its owners lived year round on the boat and were making preparations for a cozy Christmas Eve.

“A cozy Christmas Eve,” she repeated aloud, and gave a bitter laugh. Her eyes prickled as she thought of her children—Sam, with his ten-year-old’s innocence still intact, and Lally, fighting to maintain her wary, adolescent cool against the excitement of the holiday. They were at her parents’, waiting to meet their cousin, her brother Duncan’s newfound child.

Cousins,
she supposed she should say, recalling that the woman her brother lived with had a small son of her own. Why hadn’t they married? she wondered. Had they discovered that the secret of a happy relationship was not taking each other for granted? Or were they just cautious, not wanting to make a mistake that could bind them to years of misery? She could give them a bit of advice, if they asked her.

Then, guiltily, she remembered that she had no corner on misery. They had lost a child this time last year, a baby born just a few weeks too early to be viable. Her face flushed with shame as she thought of her failure to call, or even to write. She had meant to, but somehow she could never manage to find the words to bridge the gap that stretched between her and the older brother she had once adored.

And now they would be here, tonight. They were all coming to her house for a festive Christmas Eve dinner before midnight mass at St. Mary’s, and she would have to play “happy families.”

Caspar would be civil, she was sure, the perfect host, and no one would guess that her husband had just that afternoon accused her of sleeping with his partner, Piers Dutton.

Rage swept through her again and she swung the pick hard into the crumbling mortar. She had to go home, she had to face them all, but first she would finish this one task, an accomplishment that was hers alone and untainted by lies. She would breathe with the rhythm of the blows and think of simple things, making a doorway from the front room of the barn into what had once been a feed store. The old
barn’s history stretched away from her like a ribbon; the generations of farmers who had found shelter here on frosty mornings had huddled inside on evenings like this.

One of them had mortared over what she guessed had been a manger, leaving a smooth, graying swath that broke the uniformity of the redbrick walls. It had been a good job, neat and careful, and in a way she hated to destroy it. But the barn’s new owners wanted a doorway from what would be their kitchen/living area into the back of the house, and a doorway they would have.

As the hole in the mortar widened enough to give her purchase, she hooked the tip of the pick into the mortar and pulled. A piece came loose, but still hung, attached by what looked to be a bit of cloth. Odd, thought Juliet, peering at it more closely. The barn had grown dim with the approaching dusk. She extricated the tip of the pick, then switched on her work lamp and trained it on the wall. She touched the stuff with her fingers. Fabric, yes—something pink, perhaps?

She inserted the pick again and pulled, gently, until she dislodged another piece of the mortar. Now she could see more of the material, recognizing the small pattern as leaping sheep, a dirty white against stained pink. It looked like a blanket her children had had as babies. How very odd. The fabric seemed to be nestled in a cavity that had been only lightly covered with the mortar. Shifting her position so that her body wasn’t blocking the light; she tugged at the material, freeing a little more. It seemed to be wrapped round something, another layer of cloth…pinkish cloth with a row of rusted snaps.

It’s a doll, she thought, still puzzled—a black baby doll in a pink romper suit. Why would someone put a doll inside the wall of a barn?