Wild Fell (26 page)

“Mother of God.”

Clarence shrugged. “Malcolm was disconsolate, but he apparently never left Wild Fell after that night, not even for his fiancée’s funeral. Ailsa’s body was shipped back to Toronto unaccompanied. Her father was livid, threatened all sorts of things, but nothing came of it. The Blackmore name carried a lot of clout in those days. In any case, Rosa and Malcolm died within a day of each other. That,” he said pointedly, “is another one of the very few historical facts in all of this mess. That, and the very sad reality that if the worst suspicions about the actual nature of the relationship between Alexander Blackmore and his daughter are true, then he and her brother are the only two men she ever knew.”

I sat back in my chair. The double meaning of Clarence’s “knew” was not lost on me. I was beyond merely speechless. I had been expecting some biographical sketches, not this northern gothic fairy tale.

Across the living room, Clarence took my measure. He regarded me sympathetically. “I’m sorry, Jamie. You asked. But maybe I should have minded my own business back there in the library.”

“No, I’m grateful,” I lied. “I’d heard a bit of this from the real estate agent when I went out there the first time. Nothing as detailed or graphic as this story. But still, it’s the sort of thing I probably would have appreciated her telling me before I bought the house in the first place.”

He sighed. “Well, in fairness, there isn’t any real way a British real estate agent could have known these details. They’re rather esoteric.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t deal with a real estate agent in England. I dealt with one here in Alvina. She should have warned me about this. It’s hard to imagine going back there now. It’s beautiful, but all the wood and silver and portraits in the world aren’t going to make me forget what you’ve told me about the family, and what happened in that house.”

Again, he looked confused, as he had in the library. “You dealt with a local agent? Who was it? I’m surprised I didn’t hear about it.”

“Her name is Velnette Fowler. She has an office off Main Street. I found her extremely odd. She told me she wasn’t my agent, she was the house’s agent.” I forced myself to laugh. “After what you’ve told me, I can certainly see why the house would need its own agent.”

He whispered, “Say that name again?”

“Fowler,” I said. “Velnette Fowler.”

Clarence Brocklehurst’s face drained of colour. He stared at me with some mixture of horror, anger and, most inexplicably, a new, terrible hurt.

Almost whispering, he asked, “Who are you? Why did you come to my house?

I was stunned by this sudden turn of the conversation. “
Why?
You invited me. To talk about the Blackmores, remember? Your area of expertise.”

“I remember,” Brocklehurst said coldly. “At that time I was under the impression you were serious about researching Alvina history. I repeat, what are you doing here?”

When I didn’t answer, he pointed to the door. “Please leave, Mr. Browning, if that’s even your name. I had my doubts about you when you pretended to have bought Wild Fell, which you patently did not—if you had, you wouldn’t be talking about what fine condition it’s in. The house is a wreck. I’ve been there. But you seemed to be a nice fellow, and I imagined that your interest was harmless, even if you were lying. But to . . . to . . . use
Nettie
in your lies, especially after we told you what the drowning did to us all, and what happened to her. What I’d like to know is why you did it. What were you after? Just cruel kicks?”

“Sir, I have no idea what you mean.”

He stood up abruptly. “Get out of my house, you sick,
sick
bastard. Coming here under false pretenses, getting me to talk like a lonely old fool. Who are you? What’s wrong with you? Get out now before I call the police. I’m warning you. Get out. Coming to a town like this and . . . and manipulating people? Is this how you get your kicks in the city?”

I stepped toward him and reached out with open hands. He flinched and stepped back from me.

“Mr. Brocklehurst, what’s wrong. Are you all right?”

He shouted,
“Get out of my house! NOW!”

“What’s wrong? What did I do?”

He reached for the telephone on the table next to his chair. He picked up the receiver and said, “I’m giving you to the count of three. If you’re not out of here by then, I’m calling 911. Leave, and don’t come back.”

I put up my hands and backed away toward the door. “I’m leaving,” I said. “Please calm down. I’m going. And again, I’m sorry to have upset you. But I still don’t understand what you mean by any of this. But I’m leaving.”

Standing outside on the front steps, I heard the sound of a teacup shattering on the other side of Clarence Brocklehurst’s slammed front door.

Outside, a light fog was beginning to blow in from the direction of Devil’s Lake.

I drove for twenty minutes, trying to calm myself and make some sense of what had happened, but if there was a method to Brocklehurst’s bizarre mood swing, it entirely eluded me. This had been the third surreal encounter I’d had with one of the Alvina locals since my arrival—the first was Mrs. Fowler and her refusal to take me out to the island to show me my house. The second had been the librarian, who spoke of the drowning of Brenda Egan and Sean Schwartz as though it had happened yesterday. And now her father had thrown me out of his house and accused me of being a vindictive fraud.

I pulled the Volvo over to the side of the road and phoned Hank’s number. I needed to speak to her, to tell her what had happened since I’d been here, and to hear her tell me that everything was going to be fine, that I was, as usual, making something out of nothing. I knew I wasn’t, but I needed to hear her tell me I was. After the seventh or eighth ring, Hank still hadn’t picked up, but neither had I been connected to her voicemail. Ten rings, eleven, twelve, all unanswered. I snapped the phone shut and placed it on the seat beside me, resisting the urge to throw it on the floor. I wanted to go home. I wanted to be back in the city, with my father and everything that was familiar.

My instinct was to turn the car around and find Highway 401 without delay. I didn’t want to return to Wild Fell; I just wanted to forget that I’d ever come to Alvina at all.

On impulse, I hit the speed dial key that connected me to the switchboard at the MacNeil Institute. I had planned to call Nurse Jackson in the next few days to check on my father, but at that moment I needed to hear a familiar voice. Again, the phone rang, but no one picked up. I frowned. The switchboard at MacNeil was manned twenty-four hours a day.

It’s an Alzheimer’s clinic, for God’s sake
.
Someone is always there to pick up the phone
.

I continued to let it ring. Fifteen, seventeen, finally twenty rings. After the twenty-first ring I gave up.

I stepped out of the car, intending to try again in the open air in case the signal was being jammed in some way by my location, or more likely by my distance from a powerful enough cell tower.

Across the road, I saw the tall iron spikes of what could only be Carlton Cemetery, the graveyard that Brocklehurst had identified as the location of the tomb of Alexander Blackmore and his wife, Catherine Agnes Russell.

In spite of everything I’d heard that afternoon, and in spite of my own discoveries, I was seized by a powerful need to see the grave—if only perhaps to assure myself that Alexander Blackmore was dead and in the earth here, far from the island, far from the house I’d purchased that bore his name. It might, I felt, remove some of the revulsion I carried with me since finding his slashed portrait hidden away in the cellar. There was no doubt in my mind now about who had done the slashing, or why—or what she had been trying to say with it. Rosa Blackmore may have been a victim, but she had not been a mute one.

Once inside the gates, the Carlton Cemetery was larger than it had first appeared from the other side of the wrought iron fence. A small chapel stood opposite the entrance. It appeared to have been constructed using the same local quarry granite as had been used in the construction of Wild Fell, but it had been designed in a more modest variation of the same gothic revival style.

The stone path leading deeper into the cemetery was overgrown, and littered with fallen leaves and pine needles. The surface of the majority of the gravestones were worn nearly smooth, but I was still able to make out enough names and dates to recognize that the cemetery was very old—older than any cemetery I had ever been in.

Some of the stones dated back to the early 1800s and marked the final resting places of families with Scottish and English names—MacIsaac, Kilbride, McKitrick, McDermid, Hungerford, Weaver, Weatherly, Cartwright, Foley, Barrs.

The trees shielding the graves were mostly old growth white pine, interspersed here and there with the ubiquitous oak and maple and elm; here, as elsewhere in Alvina, the leaves had turned and fallen in earnest, carpeting the ground in yellow, red and brown. Squirrels scampered and chased each other around the tombstones like unsupervised children at play.

All in all, the effect was not one of neglect, the age of everything notwithstanding. Rather, it seemed to be a place of rest—obviously, for the dead, but also for the living. However unlikely, it was not inconceivable to imagine families picnicking here after visiting the graves of departed loved ones, or of walking dogs in the more convivial seasons.

In short order, I found the Blackmore mausoleum. It was a far cry from a mere tombstone, a far cry even from a cenotaph. It would have been impossible
not
to find the last resting place of the Blackmores, which clearly was the intention of the man who commissioned its construction before he died.

The tomb itself featured a four-sided roof with stained-glass dormer windows. The glass was too dirty to clearly identify the design, but it looked to be ecclesiastical in nature. Carved marble lions slumbered on pillars next to the wide stairs leading to the door. Four Greek revival marble pillars supported the roof, the peak of which was blazoned with the name BLACKMORE cut into the marble. I walked around the side of the tomb and read the inscription grandly carved into the wall of the tomb, below the coat of arms:

In Memory of Alexander Samuel Blackmore

Master of Wild Fell

A native of St. Juliot in Cornwall

Died 13
th
September 1850

In the 50
th
year of his Age

ALSO

Catherine Agnes Russell

Wife of the Above

Died 20
th
January 1847

In the 37
th
year of her Age

I walked around the entire tomb and searched the immediate grounds, but I couldn’t find the graves of Rosa and Malcolm Blackmore. Even though there was a clearly designated vacancy beneath Alexander and Catherine Blackmore’s epitaph where Rosa and Malcolm’s epitaphs were meant to be inscribed—and, given the size of the mausoleum, someday
their
children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—there was no mention of the Blackmores’ son and daughter carved anywhere on the mausoleum.

That in itself—the sharp, abrupt end of a dynasty that had barely begun—whispered its own mysterious, poignant tale, one that suggested much but offered nothing by way of explanation.

None of it was surprising, of course, given what I now suspected about the Blackmores. It seemed likely that in their old age, Rosa and Malcolm Blackmore had left instructions to be buried elsewhere in the cemetery, perhaps as far from their father as possible. Still, I decided to make at least one cursory attempt to find their graves before leaving the cemetery.

In short order, I found myself in the newer section of the cemetery—“new” being a relative term, as some of the graves dated from the 1930s and 1940s, though most were much newer than that, and dated from the 1960s and later.

In the shade of a large oak beside a stone bench, I came upon what was obviously a family plot. The graves were arranged in a circle around a small, delicate gravestone clearly a young girl’s. At the upper curve of the stone was perched a tiny stone angel, hands folded in prayer and mourning. After the ostentation of the Blackmore tomb, I found this marker poignant in its simplicity. I leaned down and read the name on the stone.

BRENDA LOUISE EGAN

1944–1960

Beloved daughter and niece, taken too soon

The Sky is Brighter Tonight

I had found the grave of the girl who had drowned in Devil’s Lake, near Wild Fell in 1960. Next to her stone was a larger, plainer one engraved
Thomas Egan
, with the dates of his birth and death, and next to it was the grave of
Edith Austin Egan, Wife and Mother.
The grieving family was gathered around their daughter, finally reunited in death. Farther behind were two more gravestones, these obviously belonging to Brenda Egan’s grandparents.

As I turned away from the Egan plot to resume my search for Malcolm and Rosa Blackmore’s graves, a squirrel skipped past my feet. Startled by the sudden movement, I followed its grey trajectory across the ground toward the trunk of the oak tree up which it scampered.

In doing so, I noticed that there was one more grave in the plot. I hadn’t noticed it before because, unlike the others which had been upright, this one was a flat stone set into the earth face-up.

What I read on the tombstone, I read twice. Then I read it a third time. Then a fourth time. But even when I’d read it a fifth time, the initial chill I’d felt remained. The stone read,
Velnette Audrey Fowler (1935–1967), Beloved Wife of Arthur Wallace Fowler and Devoted Aunt of Brenda Egan.
And below that,
Vengeance is Mine Sayeth the Lord.

What kept my knees from buckling—the
only
thing—was the knowledge that what I was seeing must be a mistake, or a coincidence, or some sort of prank.

When rational sense told me that there was no possibility of a “coincidence” like this in a town as small as Alvina, and that no one could be playing a joke on me with a gravestone that had lain undisturbed in a country cemetery for almost half a century, I shut rational sense down and instead focused on the details of Mrs. Fowler’s appearance: the distinctive way she drove her Chevy at a snail’s pace along the road to Wild Fell; the way she’d thrown the keys at my feet.