Two if by Sea

  That day, it was so cold that he and Patrick were encumbered by thick Carhartt overalls and gloves. Frank had forgotten the raw misery of a Wisconsin February.

  “Sweet fucking Jesus, guv, how would you bear it ever?” Patrick said. “Filthy fucking cold.”

  “You don’t get used to it,” Frank said.

  At least, inside the big barn, they were out of the wind.

  “What did you do before?” Patrick asked. “When you lived in the States.”

  “Police,” Frank said. “Mounted police. In Chicago.”

  “Did you like that?”

  “I liked it. Now that I look back, I loved it. It was the best thing I ever did.”

  “Stopped out, though?”

  “I got in an accident.”

  “On horseback?” Patrick was suddenly still, steeped in attentiveness, and it was fearful to think of him remembering the screams of the horses, the curses of riders, the clatter of stiles and crisping of smashed foliage that attended a fall in a jumps race. For pure unluckiness, such an accident felt like a house fire.

  “No. I got hit by a car in the rain. I had been covering for a regular traffic cop.”

  “Whyn’t be a detective? Or some big toff like that?”

  “Detectives in Chicago are just regular police, not commanders. They work on major crimes, murder and big robberies. I liked working with the horses,” Frank said. “I liked how people saw the horses. Police show up and everybody hates you. Firefighters show up, and everybody cheers. Hooray! Here come the Marines! I was police, but that’s how people reacted to the horses. They respected them.”

  “Your own horse?”

  “No. He was a donated horse, Tarmac, a Standardbred. Dark gray. Like asphalt. A funny color. They started to train him as a harness racer . . . would you call that a carriage racer? It didn’t work out.” Frank finished the interior patch of a three-foot-round hole in the roof of the barn, over an unoccupied box stall. The shingling would have to wait for better weather. “What about you? Did you always want to ride?”

  “I didn’t want to do it when I did it,” said Patrick. “I hated it. I just had the knack. I was the youngest of six boys, ten kids altogether. I was for a priest. I graduated with honors from seminary and had a scholarship to college.” Frank knew better than to ask what changed, as some kind of pain shimmered, then melted like mist. Patrick wiped away nothing on his mouth with the back of his glove and said, “Bastards.” Frank wasn’t sure if Patrick meant the moldy, studded boards they’d just thrown down or whoever had driven him from the steeple to the dangerous thunder of a steeplechase.

  That was when Ian screamed.

  Frank leaped down five rungs of the ladder, staggering on his bad leg. Ian had stepped on one of those curled roof boards studded with rusty roofing nails Frank had thrown down. Blood pooled where the tender rind of his pink heel was pierced in two places, right through the sole. Everything he’d heard about horses and metal and tetanus flooded Frank’s brain. Taking Ian in his arms, he judged where the big veins were, and knew he should pull out the nails. He pulled them out, ignoring the child’s screams as he wet a towel with hot water and pressed it to the small foot.

  Summoned, Hope was back in five minutes. She drove to the emergency room while Ian wept (loudly; he did have quite a voice) and clung to Frank’s neck.

  The tetanus shot was ferocious, as was cleaning the wounds, which went deep, because Ian had been running. If she hadn’t known Hope since high school, the doctor looked as though she would have liked to report Frank.

  “That’s not a child-friendly environment,” the doctor said.

  “It’s his home, and I have to teach him to be careful there.”

  “You can’t really teach a three-year-old kid to watch his feet every minute, Mr. Mercy.”

  “I know. It’s my fault. I feel awful about it.”

  Hope and Frank took Ian to the achingly expensive tourist-grandmother toy store in town and bought him hundreds of dollars’ worth of Legos. For two days, whenever Ian gently disengaged himself from Frank to play with his new toys, it was Frank, not Ian, who seemed emptied out, bereft. Devoutly he wished Ian did not have superpowers, because he could not discern what Ian was eliciting from him, and what Frank really felt on his own.

  The following week, Frank took Ian to school. Just before he went inside, Frank realized he had no idea what to say.

  “He doesn’t talk,” Frank told the teacher, after telling Ian that it was okay to go over and play with the blocks. “He talked before the tsunami, but not since then.”

  “That’s hard,” the teacher said. “For you and for us.”

  For her? Frank thought. Had she not heard the word tsunami, or was that not common lingo every day on Center Street in Spring Green, Wisconsin? He had to remind himself that this was the nature of teachers, a kaleidoscope with a very narrow lens. His leg began to drum.

  He said, “Well, at least he won’t be disruptive.”

  The teacher said, “We do teach kids who have handicaps.” A little girl sat in the corner with a grubby doll tightly clamped between her feet, twisting a strand of her hair and rocking metronomically. “Has he had his hearing tested?”

  Frank said, “He doesn’t have a hearing deficit. We think it’s a result of trauma.”

  “But does he have a history of ear infections?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not always easy to tell. Some children form scar tissue without parents ever knowing. Their hearing is then like this.” The young woman with her ingenuous clusters of hair ribbons stuffed both index fingers into her ears. Frank wanted to stomp on her foot. “Has he had a hearing test since you’ve been here?”

  “No, but doctors in Australia know about hearing,” Frank said.

  “Doctors at the University of Wisconsin specialize in children who have hearing loss at the upper and lower ends of the spectrum.”

  “I would guess this was the result of emotional trauma.”

  “What kinds of emotional trauma?”

  “Besides seeing most of his family die in a flood on Christmas morning?”

  “Yes, besides that. Were there other kinds of abuse?”

  “No! Isn’t that enough?” Frank said.

  “We’re set up to handle only a small range of differences . . .”

  “He’s not as different as that little girl in the corner is. I don’t know if he’s going to grow up gay or allergic to cashews . . .”

  “What other allergies does he have?”

  “He isn’t allergic to anything I know of.” Frank glanced over at Ian, who carefully bared his teeth in a monster face and put up claws, waggling his head back and forth. Frank laughed. “Do you have some papers I should look at? I’m sure his pediatrician can fill out the forms you need, too.”

  “We have two open spaces in this class. But we would need the full tuition for the semester that started in January.”

  “Okay. That’s fine. Why?”

  “Well, he needs all the same things as if he was starting school in January. School supplies, an art cart, tissues, a sturdy backpack . . .”

  “I see. You supply all that?”

  “No, those things are supplied by the parent.”

  “So . . . I don’t mind paying, but what am I . . .”

  “Paying for? It’s more demanding of our staff expertise with individual child development to mainstream a student with learning problems coming in midterm. We’ll have to wait and see,” said the teacher with the cherubic face and satanic soul, as though preschool was something mysterious and arcane, like the Electoral College. “If you can get those papers back to us by next week?” Proudly, Ian held up a paper on which he had written all of his letters, capitals and lower case, and his name, IANMRCY.

  “Did Dad teach you this?” the teacher asked, and Ian nodded. Frank had no idea that Ian could write those letters. Ian gave her the paper, and did his small motion—right, left. The sabertooth preschool warden melted. She knelt a
nd hugged him. “Welcome to school, Ian.”

  • • •

  “You made her do that,” Frank said. Ian chuckled soundlessly. “And you’ve been holding out on me. Where did you learn to write letters?” Big, elaborate grin and shrug. “You think you’re smart?” Frank tickled Ian so hard that the whole car seat shook.

  The following week, loaded down comically with ten pounds of school supplies, Ian joined his class. When Frank left, Ian’s hug was urgent, tenacious, but the other kids were eyeing him closely, and after a moment, Ian straightened his shoulders and gave Frank a cheerful salute, his eyes overbright. As Frank turned away, he thought, Good boy. And he thought, Well, I can do this. For the first time since Natalie’s death, and since Ian came to him, he could see a clear path. If nothing else went awry, he could walk that path. Putting the invisible house of his life in place had taken months of human effort. Knocking it awry was but the work of a moment for the gods, and nothing would ever be the same.

  “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 h
is 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?”