The Secret Book of Flora Lea: a Novel, page 12
Bridie sipped her tea and leaned forward, placing her elbows on the table. “You were always such an enchanting child, seeing magic all around you.” Bridie smiled. “It would make sense that you’d know the secret worlds hidden inside our own.”
“Oh. No.” Hazel shook her head. “It wasn’t like that. This was a simple place where we went together and had adventures, then came home.”
“But for being there, you were better and braver upon your return?” Bridie asked.
“Yes, better and braver. That was true.” Hazel bit her bottom lip. “Until it wasn’t true.”
“Go on.”
“I believe that on the day she disappeared, Flora went looking for our land without me.”
“You believe she went looking for the land or you know this?”
“I believe.”
“The name of this place?” Bridie asked.
“Whisperwood,” Hazel said.
“Whisperwood,” Bridie repeated, closing her eyes.
Hazel reached into her bag and withdrew Peggy Andrews’s book, dropped it onto the table. “Now there is this.”
Bridie didn’t pick it up but instead just touched its surface. “Did you write this? You were always such a beautiful writer.”
“No. An author in America wrote it. Someone is using our land for their own stories.”
Bridie paused. “Could this author be Flora?” Her voice held such hope as she said out loud all that Hazel wanted to believe.
“No. I thought so for a brief moment, but she’s the wrong age. That’s all I really know about her.”
“Could Flora have told this author her story?”
“That’s what I am trying to figure out.”
Bridie nodded. “So you feel like your secret place, your beautiful world, your fairy land as it were, took Flora from you.”
“Yes. I know it did.”
“You must let go of such ideas, Hazel.” Bridie slid her chair forward and placed her hands on either side of Hazel’s face, just as she had done when Hazel had been a child. “Despair leads us to stories, of course. We invent them so we can live in a world with meaning. I told you stories. We danced to stories. I spun them over fires and over this very kitchen table. What you did—making up a land for Flora and for yourself—gave you both comfort during a very scary time. Dearest Hazel, bad things don’t always have a blaming place to land.” She paused. “Did you or Flora ever tell Harry?”
“I didn’t, but that’s what I need to find out. Perhaps Flora told him and he told someone else? Or she is… alive?”
Bridie’s brows rose. “Oh, if that were to be true.” She held her hand over her heart.
“What happened after I left?” Hazel asked so quietly that Bridie had to lean forward and ask her to repeat the question.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Bridie said. “The investigators were doing their job.”
“Tell me, please. I did hear them asking Harry about his sketches, and I took some with me.”
Bridie leaned back in her chair, finding Hazel’s gaze with her own. “Everyone in town was a suspect, Hazel. We weren’t singled out.”
“Yes, you were,” Hazel said. “I know you don’t want me to know, but you were. I read the papers. I have the articles.” Just saying it out loud—what she knew, what she heard during those days she wandered the streets of Oxford with her mum, who hung photos of Flora on every lamppost and shop window she could.
The Aberdeen family had been under suspicion. Bridie first had a missing husband, and years later a missing child. The story was too delicious for the press to ignore.
“They did not accuse me because of you, Hazel. They questioned me because they said I had already lost one person.”
“Your husband,” Hazel said.
Bridie looked at Hazel. “Yes, but, I didn’t actually lose him. He was never my husband. He was… my lover. A visiting Oxford professor. Unbeknownst to me, he had his own wife and child in Scotland.” She lifted her chin. “It wasn’t something to talk about. He returned to his family and I never heard from him again. I have no idea what happened to him. For a long time, I wanted to know where he went and why. I dreamed of him returning. Harry and I found our way together. I know you heard the gossip about it, but listen, Hazel, people need explanations. They need meaning and reasons. Even if that reason turns an ordinary woman into one who can make people disappear into thin air.”
“Oh, Bridie. I didn’t know about Harry’s father.”
She nodded. “Why would you? I told Harry when he was ten years old, but he’s never sought him out.”
“And they blamed Harry, too,” said Hazel, feeling the familiar guilt and shame.
“They questioned him about his sketches. That’s true. There’s always a scapegoat, my love. Always. It is part of every story if you look closely enough.”
“But this isn’t a story,” Hazel cried out. “This is your life. His life. Where did he go? Where’s Harry now?”
“An artist colony.”
A jolt of electricity hit her gut. “Where?”
Bridie stood and walked toward Hazel’s old room off the kitchen. Hazel wanted to follow her in, look around to see if there was anything of their old and beautiful life to be found in there, but she waited. She heard a drawer opening, then Bridie returned with a folded newspaper article about St. Ives—an artist colony on the Cornish coast.
“I’ve heard of this place,” Hazel said. “I went to an art show in Chelsea last month and it featured these artists. The pottery was extraordinary.”
“Maybe his paintings were among the others,” Bridie said. “He’s quite good. As you know, he was always a drawer, but now he’s expanded into oils.”
“What does he paint?” Hazel asked.
“Why don’t you go find out for yourself?”
“I don’t think I can,” Hazel said. “I don’t know if I can face him.”
“Well, dear, only Harry can answer the questions you have for him. Sometimes…” She leaned forward. “Sometimes we have to face our dragons.”
“And there’s no knight to save us,” Hazel said, remembering when they sat around a bonfire on St. Brigid’s Day. It had seemed such a fun thing to say, such a flippant idea that they didn’t need a knight, but now it was raw and true: Hazel needed to slay her own dragons.
The cottage had changed little. The embers in the hearth might have been burning since Hazel left that October morning with her mum and without Flora. But just like that, Hazel was back here, in the kitchen, only steps from her old bedroom. She almost saw the girl she used to be, the one who believed in magic and hidden lands.
“Can you tell me the story of Whisperwood?” Bridie asked.
“Yes,” Hazel said. “Not very long ago and not very far away…”
CHAPTER 18
March 1960
Hazel sat in the metal chair in front of Chief Inspector Aiden Davies’s cluttered desk in the Thames Valley Police Department.
After their tea, Bridie had dropped Hazel off in Oxford’s town center, late afternoon offering it a hazy magical glow. Hazel had walked straight to the Thames Valley Police Department across from the grand tawny pinnacles of Christ Church College. Now she stared at Aiden Davies’s bald head. It had a shine that Hazel believed must be from the way he continually rubbed his broad hand over his head, back and forth, as he spoke, taking his time as if waiting for the right words to form under his palm.
This was the man who had given up on Flora’s case years ago when a nameless body had been found in the bogs of Wallingford, the child they’d believed to be Flora.
“Good to see you, Hazel. So, you have new evidence, you say?” he asked.
“Yes.” She quickly told Aiden about the fairy tale; she didn’t use the name Whisperwood, or even the full tale, but told him just enough to let him know that there might be hope. “I’ve made a list of everyone who might have heard us tell the story, and the only people I am unable to locate are those four nurses who lived behind the parish.”
“I remember ’em—one American, three British. One of them wept when Flora went missing like it was her own child. We sent a social worker to calm her down. But, believe me, we checked ’em out, Hazel. And the war did those volunteer nurses no good. Many were traumatized. They’d believed they would just wear white uniforms and wipe the brows of handsome soldiers. Most of us saw what was coming, if you paid any attention to the planes buzzing overhead, to the wireless addresses, but I don’t think those nurses were ready. When your sister—”
“Disappeared,” Hazel said.
“Yes, that was right at the beginning of the Blitz. It was bad days.”
“Indeed.” She leaned forward and placed her hands on the edge of the desk, gripping it. “Do you have the names? Their contact information?”
“We don’t track ’em if they aren’t suspects. But I do have their names, of course. In the files.”
“Could you get that for me?”
He rubbed his head again and stared off, past Hazel, past the moment, and muttered, “It ain’t gonna do you no good, digging around back there. You can’t find what’s gone. I tell that journalist the same bloody thing.” He looked at Hazel and sadness shimmered about him. It was more than Flora’s loss that affected him, Hazel knew that. It was what he’d seen in the twenty years since. War. Drugs in Oxford. Gangs. Death.
“But here’s the new thing,” she told him, wanting to relieve some of the deep sorrow. “If that story is alive, she might be, too.”
“Oh?” His eyebrows lifted. “So that’s what you’re thinkin’.”
“Yes.”
He automatically tapped his fingers on the desk, a metronome of his thoughts. “I can find those files for you.” Aiden stood up, placed his hands on the desk, and tilted toward her on their weight. “You be waitin’ here. I’ll be back in a moment.”
It was longer than a moment that Hazel waited, standing, sitting, standing again, looking about his cramped office, but Aiden eventually returned with a piece of paper and gave it to her. “All of their names are right here. I will do some digging of my own and see if I can find out where these ladies are living.”
Hazel glanced at the page.
Imogene Wright (UK)
Frances Arkland (US)
Maeve Muldoon (UK)
Lilly Carnigan (UK)
“I’ll be giving these to that journalist, too. She’s trying to write the story. And to be honest, I could use the help. A new pair of eyes. She’s done a mighty fine job with the other stories.”
“Please don’t.” Hazel shook her head. “What I just told you about the book is confidential. You cannot tell Dorothy Bellamy about this. Do you hear me? Aiden, she calls Flora the ‘The River Child.’ It’s rubbish.”
“Yes, I hear you.”
“That woman writes to me and Mum nearly every three months. Please. Let me find this on my own.” She paused. “Let’s me and you find out what this means on our own.”
“Well, I think her articles in the magazine are good. She sticks to the facts. As for Flora’s case, she ain’t doing a hit piece or even trying to solve the mystery; she just wants to tell what happened that day. She ain’t investigating it. She’s not gonna fly off on some whimsy. I promise ya.”
“Sounds like she got to you. But you can’t promise me anything about her, Aiden. And this is ours. Not hers. Please, I can’t see Flora in yet another magazine. It would bring it all back for Mum.”
“I hear ya.” Aiden took a breath so deep that his nostrils flared. “But if I missed something back then I will never forgive myself.”
“Don’t think like that,” she said. “We all have to forgive ourselves.”
We all have to forgive ourselves.
The words were bitter and false on her tongue as Hazel walked out of the police station and onto the high street. It was advice she knew was impossible for herself to take, cold comfort to be uttered carelessly to a man who spent his life solving mysteries and seeing the worst of humanity.
* * *
Day rolled toward night out the train’s window. Returning to London from Oxford, Hazel watched the sky shift from pale to inky blue, the greening trees transformed to darker shades. By the time she stepped onto the railway station’s platform at Oxford Circus Station, she was as bone tired as if she’d run from Binsey to Bloomsbury. But she’d promised Barnaby she’d meet him for dinner at Simpson’s in the Strand.
It was time to plan Paris, he’d said.
But if she were honest with herself, all that—Hogan’s and Paris and Sotheby’s—seemed like someone else’s life. Her past had tumbled into the present, blurring the lines.
She’d gotten off the train one station early, clearly not thinking straight. She glanced at her watch to see she had fifteen minutes to hustle to the restaurant. She’d be late; it was over a mile to walk.
Already a mess, she was also not dressed for the restaurant in her beige slacks and simple white poplin shirt. Her hair was flying about untamed, but at least this time she’d show up. She couldn’t disappoint Barnaby again.
Passing Liberty London’s brightly colored store windows, then weaving through the crowds and onto Carnaby Street, she felt she was in a peculiar netherworld. Music poured out the doors of jazz venues that would be open all night. Mannequins wearing short skirts gazed from windows with painted-on unblinking eyes that seemed like hallucinations. Passing more clothing stores, she dully wondered what she’d wear to see Harry if she went to St. Ives, then chided herself for the foolishness of caring when she was on her way to see Barnaby.
Walking as fast as she could without breaking into a run, she turned onto Beak Street to find an art display. A sapling-thin artist, tall with a grimy top hat and a mustache so bushy it seemed false, displayed his wares as tinny carnival music played from a transistor radio. His bright and garish paintings were of clowns, jugglers, circus tents, and acrobats. And among them, spotlighted below a streetlamp, glared the Pied Piper, who wore a bright red cap, strutting along playing a flute, leading little boys and girls to their doom.
Hazel stopped midstep, tripped on the edge of the granite curb, and fell. She felt a shock of pain in her right knee and left wrist as she hit the pavement. The artist reached out his hand to help her up, but she didn’t take it, instead standing on her own, brushing dirt off her pants, and staring at his painting. “This,” she said.
“It’s a copy of the famous Maxfield Parrish,” he said in a deep voice with a thick Cockney accent. “If you ask me, mine’s better than the original.”
She was too steeped in messages from the invisible world to see this painting as something as simple as a reproduction. It was a sign to keep going. She was on the right path.
She looked to the man, someone out of a strange mirage. “It’s lovely,” she lied as she walked away, not looking back.
Ahead of her on the pavement stood her brother with a group of friends; Tenny. She knew him from a block away by his floppy hair and tweed jacket. He and his mates were smoking, passing around a bottle of wine that looked mighty fine, even from where she stood. It was most likely from the wine cellar of Mr. Alastair Tennyson. She moved to cross the street, hoping to go unnoticed, but then changed her mind. She approached the group of four boys, all of them laughing about something Tenny had said.
His eyes met Hazel’s and his face fell, the laughter gone. He dropped his cigarette and crushed it with the heel of his camel-colored Oxford shoe. She smiled at him and for a moment she thought he might run. Then he smiled in return. It was a moment of camaraderie without a single word spoken. The other boys saw the glance.
“Who’s that dame?” a boy with hair so black it shimmered under the lamplight asked.
“My sister,” Tenny said. “So shut your mouth.”
“Damn,” another in a felt cap said. “Nice.”
Tenny shoved the boy, who held up his hands in surrender with a laugh. Tenny glanced at Hazel and she waved over her shoulder and continued walking.
Neither she nor Tenny had chosen their parents or their life, so why had she been so hard on him? On her mum? What she’d really have liked to do was grab that bottle from the blond boy with the plaid jacket and taken a swig of the wine herself.
Minutes later, she rushed under the restaurant’s arched entryway and into the main room lit by the flash and sparkle of crystal chandeliers. Barnaby read the menu at a table near the paneled wall; a gold sconce cast light above his head.
Everywhere there were men in suits and ties, women in black dresses with pearls. Barnaby looked up as she approached the table. He smiled at first, then his eyebrows moved down. He tilted his head. “Love, are you all right?”
She sat, facing him across the white linen tablecloth and red short-cut roses in the silver vase. “It’s been a hell of a day. I’ll tell you all about it after I have a drink. But how are you?”
He lifted a highball, already nearly empty. He drank the remainder and set it down.
“I’m really sorry.” Hazel glanced around for the waiter.
After ordering a bottle of wine and an appetizer of calamari, he asked, “Where have you been all day, my love?”
“Binsey.”
A long pause before he repeated the name of the town. Leaning back, Barnaby sipped his whiskey. “Looks like the past didn’t so much come back to haunt you as you went and hunted it down.”
Hazel felt a deep tremor of an unsettling at the foundation of their life; he was annoyed by something that was as important to her as the next breath. The sounds of other patrons filled the room, laughter and overlapping conversations, a piano player in the far corner singing a Frank Sinatra song.
“I don’t understand why this is happening to us,” he said. “Just when we’re about to start our new life.”
* * *
In Hazel’s bed, Barnaby pulled Hazel close, spooning around her. He was naked and she in a silk nightgown he’d once bought her as a birthday gift. He kissed her earlobe and whispered, “I want you to know that I will pay for the illustrations and the book. Please stop worrying about it.”
