The Skeleton Garden Page 19

  I take down our farm’s market stand at the end of the day on Wednesday. Meet you after. I’ve something to tell you.

  —Letter from Home Farm, Ratley

  Chapter 28

  Pru watched the empty lane hoping he would come back, that this latest thunderstorm of anger would dissipate as quickly as others had. She knew better, of course. And as the dim light of late afternoon vanished into darkness, it took the remainder of Pru’s spirits with it. She dragged herself into the kitchen and sank into a chair. Evelyn snapped the lid on the last of the pensioners’ meals and wiped her hands on her apron.

  “The magazine folk—they didn’t want a cuppa before they left?”

  Pru stole a look over her shoulder, afraid that Jacinta had followed her into the kitchen. “No,” she said flatly, “they needed to be on their way.”

  “Here now,” Evelyn said, “you look knackered. I’ve just poured up the tea and sliced the Madeira cake. Did it go well?”

  Pru fought to keep her chin from quivering. She couldn’t speak about it—she couldn’t confess that while attempting to save her brother embarrassment, she’d forced him to quit his life’s work. “As well as we could expect,” she said. “Your lunch was the hit of the afternoon. Thanks for doing that.”

  Evelyn shrugged. “It was no trouble.” She moved to her coat, hanging near the door, drew a packet out of one of the pockets, and stood looking down at it. Pru had poured milk in her tea and taken a bite of cake before she noticed that Evelyn hovered at the end of the table.

  “What have you got there?” she asked, nodding to the envelope Evelyn fingered.

  “I had a bit of a clearing out last evening,” she said. “And I came across a few photos. Old ones—some of my ma. Some from the war. I thought, if you’re still looking for bits and pieces to use at the dance, these could do. Didn’t know if you might not want to see them.”

  “I’d love to. Bring them over,” Pru said, welcoming the diversion from her dark thoughts.

  They sat next to each other at the table, and Evelyn opened the envelope. The photos were black-and-white, of various sizes, mostly dog-eared. “There we are now,” Evelyn said, holding one out. “The Land Girls of Home Farm.”

  Five young women posed around a tractor outside a barn. They wore the same outfits—light-colored trousers, boots, sweaters with a badge sewn on—and all had their hair tied up in scarves. Four of them stood at casual attention with pleasant expressions, and the fifth—

  She sat on the wheel of the tractor with her legs crossed like a pin-up girl, her arms straight at her sides and palms pressing on the wheel. Her light-colored curly hair escaped the headscarf by accident or by design. She had a saucy smile and deep dimples. The photo may be black-and-white, but Pru could imagine those were red, red lips. “There she is,” Evelyn said, tapping her finger on the dimpled lady. “My ma, Sadie Farrow.”

  Pru looked from the photo of the petite woman to tall, broad-shouldered Evelyn, who blushed. “She’s lovely, Ev—and she looks so young.”

  “She became a Land Girl in ’39, right at the beginning of it all, and was sent down here for training with a few other girls. They had accommodations on the farm with Bosky Atkins and his wife. She was only seventeen,” Evelyn said, “and had never been out of Croydon—it’s south London. She said it was worth giving up going to the cinema to get away from her dad.”

  “And she stayed and worked here even after the war?”

  “She did,” Evelyn said, nodding and handing Pru the next snapshot. “Here we are. This is ages after the war, of course—it must be 1955 or so. That’s me standing with my ma in front of our cottage. I was about ten there.”

  Now, Sadie’s hair was pulled back tight and the lines on her face showed that the years had not been easy. Still, she had a wide smile and deep dimples, and both arms wrapped around her equally dimpled daughter, who, at ten years of age, was already as tall as her mother.

  “Ah, Evelyn,” Pru said, unable to keep the quaver out of her voice. “You look so much like her. I can see she loved you very much.”

  Evelyn nodded while she dug in her apron pocket and came up with a hankie. “She didn’t have it easy. My father, you see.” Evelyn stopped and looked sideways at Pru before continuing. “He wasn’t around. Ma said he died in the war, before they could marry—before I was born. She never told me much about him—I think it was too hard on her, but she always said he loved me.” She blew her nose.

  “She did a good job with you, though, didn’t she?”

  “She was the best mother,” Evelyn said, brightening up and moving to the next photo. “Oh now, these are all in a jumble. Here’s the war again—look who she’s with here.”

  Another snapshot at the farm. Sadie, back to young and saucy, sat on a bale of hay, smiling and looking up at the young man standing next to her. He had his arm casually draped over her shoulder and a cigarette hung loosely from the corner of his mouth. His dark hair had been combed back in a wave. He was unsmiling, but not unpleasant.

  “Is that him?” Pru whispered. “Is that your dad?”

  Evelyn frowned as she looked at the photo. “I never saw this until she had died, so I never got the chance to ask. Since I came across it in her things, I’ve always thought it might be. Mostly hoped, I suppose—it would be nice to have a dad.”

  “He’s a looker,” Pru said. “He’s in uniform.”

  “RAF. Look there now”—Evelyn pointed to the man’s uniform jacket—“that’s a pilot’s badge embroidered on. There was an airfield nearby, and my ma told me that the Land Girls would meet up with fellows at the pub in the evenings. But she only ever told me about one special one she met in ’44. My dad. They were in love,” Evelyn said, with a note of pride in her voice.

  A pregnant young woman abandoned toward the end of the war—this sounded all too familiar to Pru. “But she was alone. How did she get along?” What Pru actually wanted to ask was how the rest of the village treated her.

  “Everyone was always good to us,” Evelyn said. “No one ever spoke bad about my ma or my dad—in fact, they never said a word about him. Even after Ma was gone, when I asked Kitty and Stan—they were the ones who would remember—they told me why don’t I let them rest in peace.”

  “Your dad might’ve died while on a mission,” Pru said. And Sadie, who was not his wife, would have no right to know anything or ask for support from the military. “Do you know his name?”

  Evelyn turned the photo over. There in scrolly penciled writing, it said: Will and me.

  “Will,” Pru read. At least Evelyn’s mother looked happy at that moment. Pru studied Sadie’s face and thought about the hard years the young woman had ahead of her. She passed the photo back to Evelyn, but when Evelyn tried to take it, Pru’s fingers held on.

  “Wait,” she said, and brought the photo closer, then farther away to try to get it in focus. Will’s right hand was in the foreground, close enough to the camera for Pru to see, on his right pinkie finger, a gold ring. The hairs on the back of her neck and on her arms stood up, and her breath came quick. “Look. What’s that?”

  Evelyn peered at the snapshot. “It’s a ring,” she said. “Why?”

  Pru remembered that Evelyn had been on duty in the kitchen during the dig when the plane and skeleton were found, and with Jack’s death, the search for the man’s identity had fallen off the radar. She grabbed Evelyn’s arm. “They found a ring in the pit with the plane and the body. A small gold ring.”

  They both stared at the photo. Pru felt the kitchen fill up with the years that had gone by between the war and that moment. “That ring?” Evelyn asked at last, jabbing at the photo. “They found that ring here at Greenoak? Are you saying those bones…that it’s this Will, and he’s been dead in the garden all these years? This Will who could be my dad?”

  Try not to get carried away, Pru told herself, but she was almost too excited to speak. “We don’t know that, but it’s a clue. Maybe we can find out. We need Will’s su
rname? Evelyn?”

  Evelyn stroked the photo of her mother’s hair lightly with her index finger, lost in a daydream. Pru patted her hand and Evelyn looked up. “I don’t know his surname,” she said. “But I have a few more bits from Ma. She wrote up a journal of sorts about the farm and her work—I’ve saved it all in a box.”

  At that moment, Peachey arrived, talking as he came in the door. “Sorry to be late, Evelyn my love, but I’d a last-minute call-out for a dead battery up Stonymarsh way. I’m here now, and all yours. And the pensioners.”

  The two women exchanged glances, and Pru nodded to Evelyn, who told her husband the story. He was properly amazed. As he helped Evelyn pack up, he spoke aloud the thoughts swelling in Pru’s mind. “But if those bones are really your mum’s beau, how did he end up buried with a Messerschmitt?”

  They might’ve found one answer, but it had served only to multiply the questions. Evelyn left the photo with Pru, promised to bring Sadie’s box with her the next day, and drove off with Peachey. Pru left Christopher an incoherent voicemail—“Hi! I’ve found something out. Something fantastic. I think it’s true, really. Well, possible—it’s possible. So, I’ll tell you when you get home. Right. Bye!”

  She stayed in the kitchen, but couldn’t keep still; her earlier fatigue, caused by Jacinta Bloom’s dreadful visit, had vanished. She circled round the table, put the kettle on, took it off again, all the while casting her eyes on the photo from different angles. It was the same ring, she was sure of it—the photo, although black-and-white, was sharp, and she imagined she could see the raised rose design. Pru rummaged in kitchen drawers for a magnifying glass, and when she didn’t find one, went down the hall to the library, where she came across one in a map drawer. She returned to the kitchen as Christopher walked in; she threw her arms around him and began to babble.

  “Can we look at evidence from the pit? Not Jack, nothing to do with him, but I may have found something that would help us identify the skeleton. I know there wasn’t much there, but—do you remember what they came across? Apart from the bones, of course. And the bits of clothes. Am I allowed to see evidence again?” She took a breath, put a hand on his chest, and laughed. “Sorry,” she said. “Hello.” She kissed him.

  He grinned. “Hello. What have you found?”

  She began again. “Evelyn brought in photos of her mother for me to see—wasn’t that sweet? And look, here’s one from early in the war.”

  She gave him the photo and he held it out. “Is that her mother?” he asked.

  “Yes, that’s Sadie. But look closer.” Christopher patted his coat pockets in search of glasses, and Pru handed over the magnifying glass. “Use this.”

  He went immediately to Will’s hand, lower left foreground—the policeman in him, Pru thought, he always knew where to look. Christopher glanced up at her with a gleam in his eye.

  “That’s the ring, isn’t it? The one they found in the pit?” Pru asked.

  “You may be right. Had Evelyn noticed the ring?”

  Pru shook her head. “Evelyn didn’t know about the ring. To her, this is an old photo of her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Not only could it be the fellow who was buried in the pit, but the fellow in the pit could be Evelyn’s dad. Sadie told her her dad died in the war, but never talked about him otherwise.” She checked the snapshot one more time. “What do you think?”

  Christopher angled the photo to get it in better light. “I think, Ms. Parke,” he said, “that you’ve got quite an eye for clues. Do we have a name?”

  That prompted a heavy sigh. “He’s Will,” Pru said. “That’s what’s written on the back.” Christopher turned the photo over. “Evelyn said her mother wrote a journal, and she’ll look through it for us. Sounded like Sadie had quite an active social life what with the airfield so near. But then she and Will met,” Pru said, with a catch in her voice as the triumph of tracking down a clue faded, and the face of the young man rose before her, “and they fell in love. Sadie told her he died in the war.”

  She shared the last few details she had about Will, and they discussed the “what-ifs” and “could it have beens” as they ate a patchwork supper. “We need his surname for any of it to make sense,” he said. “And after that, we could check with the Ministry of Defence. And after that—well, we’ll still need to sort out what happened. He wasn’t from around here?”

  Pru shrugged. “Evelyn doesn’t know. Maybe Stan will remember now that we’ve got a name—or part of one. Or Kitty. Just think—that could be Evelyn’s dad dead here at Greenoak, and no one ever knew.”

  “Someone knew,” Christopher said.

  —

  She had said nothing about the visit by Jacinta Bloom during the meal, but thoughts of the dreadful afternoon came creeping up on her again. Christopher must’ve noticed and sensed a looming storm, because he waited until they were in front of the library fire before asking how the afternoon had gone.

  The wave of despair that she had put on hold through supper engulfed her in an instant, and when she looked down at the glass of brandy in her hand, she saw it through a curtain of tears. Christopher waited, and she struggled to take two deep breaths before spilling the story of Jacinta Bloom, her scurrilous intentions, and Pru’s sabotage of the entire scheme. When she got to Simon’s reactions, she began to shake until the sobs got the better of her voice and she could go no further.

  Christopher took the glass out of her hands, set it on the floor, and wrapped his arms round her. When she’d just passed the peak of the outburst, he reached into his pocket and handed her a handkerchief.

  “He’s quit,” she said, her voice still holding a quaver. “He’s quit a job he’s held for a lifetime. What good have I done him showing up like this at Greenoak, a garden he created. I’ve screwed up his whole life.”

  Christopher kept quiet while she mopped up her face and blew her nose. She settled back against him and sighed.

  “Claire was always going through bouts of not talking to me when we were growing up,” Christopher said. “There was once she was so angry, she wouldn’t speak to me for a month.”

  Pru took the bait gladly. “What did you do to deserve that?”

  Christopher half smiled. “I had hidden out in her bedroom behind the wardrobe and listened to her and her girlfriend talk about—well, I can’t remember what it was now, but it must’ve been important at the time. I was probably twelve and she would’ve been ten—what do ten-year-old girls talk about?”

  “Why ever were you interested in eavesdropping on them?” Pru tried to envision a twelve-year-old Christopher.

  “Well, I was a spy, wasn’t I? I was James Bond—I was Napoleon Solo.”

  Pru laughed at the image, and Christopher grinned and kissed her temple. “Claire did talk to me again and we were fine until the next flare-up. You and Simon missed out on all those childhood arguments, so now you’re having to catch up. He’ll get over it.”

  —

  Pru lay awake for most of the night, staring at their dark bedroom ceiling, forcing her mind to shift from dark thoughts of Simon to the romantic story of Will. She imagined Will’s life like the events in an old-style newsreel, but couldn’t come up with a reasonable ending. Was he alive when he fell in the pit? Did old man Saxsby have something to do with it? Did someone put him there or had he taken his own life? Why did Sadie tell her daughter that her dad had died in the war? Had she thought he’d deserted her? Of course, they didn’t know if it was Will and if Will was Evelyn’s father. She heard that last part in Christopher’s voice. True, no proof existed. Yet.

  Pru drifted away from quasi-facts to what-ifs. If Will hadn’t fallen dead in the pit, perhaps he would’ve died in the war. Or perhaps he would’ve come home from the war and married Sadie, and Evelyn would’ve known her father. Was Will a decent sort of fellow? Pru tried to shut her mind off, but there was no pause, stop, or eject button, and the wartime newsreel played on a loop until, at last, she drifted off just before dawn.

>   Chapter 29

  The department-store box that Evelyn set on the kitchen table the next morning reminded Pru of the one she kept her own mother’s mementos in, but with a bit more wear and tear. A water stain discolored the top, and one corner of its lid had been crushed, and it was now held together with duct tape.

  Sadie’s wartime journal turned out to be random thoughts about her life and the people around her that she had jotted down on any sort of paper she could find. Evelyn had stacked the entries into a pile of mismatched, crisp, yellowed pages sprinkled with spots of mold. Although her entries were undated, she had signed every page in loopy script: “Sadie Farrow.”

  At the top of the stack was an entry that had been written on the back of a Land Girl leaflet titled, Take Care of Your Gum Boots. It read: “Will, that’s his name. He’s got his left arm in a sling from an air fight in his Spitfire. He’s dark and moody. He’s gorgeous.” After a space, she had scribbled: “The farmer’s wife knows about Will, and doesn’t mind when I come in late, just says to be careful.”

  At the bottom came a discourse on farm work. “Pricked out 100 tomato seedlings today. My back is breaking and will I ever get the smell off my fingers? But I didn’t dare stop—I had a wager with the other girls that I’d finish first. They owe me five cigarettes now, so wasn’t that worth it? At least I was inside the glasshouse instead of out in the rain, spreading dung.”

  Pru looked up to find Evelyn watching her with shining eyes. “This is amazing, Ev,” she said.

  Evelyn nodded and held out another twice-used paper. “And look here, this one’s about Will.”

  Pru glanced at the back and saw it was a bill of sale for 200 “thimbles”—two-inch terra-cotta flowerpots. On the reverse, Sadie had written: “They say he’s gone, that he deserted. They’re wrong. Will would never desert—he knew his duty, and he promised when the war was over he’d come back for me. No one will listen.”