The first thing I saw when I woke up was sage and mulberry wallpaper in a William Morris design. Since I knew where I was, and since the pain in my head seemed to be gone, I closed my eyes and went back to sleep. I had never felt so comfortable in my life.
The next time I woke up I actually turned my head. Sitting in a comfy chair by the window was Larry, who was looking at a magazine. "Hi," I said weakly.
He jumped to his feet and came over to the bed, taking my hand. "Nell! How are you feeling?"
I smiled wanly at him as he checked my pulse in an admirably professional manner. "Feeling much better," I said, "I know it’s hardly an original line, but where am I? This isn’t your room."
"When Jack brought you back Carruthers had you put in the guest room in his suite. It was the only empty one in the place. He’s been beside himself with worry over you – he can’t help but feel somewhat responsible for all this, since it’s his hotel."
"Where’s Jack?" I asked.
"Sleeping in his room. His arm is in terrible shape. He was an idiot to ever take it out of the sling; he’s got some torn ligaments which are going to take some time to heal. We found a doctor here at the ball who shot him full of painkillers and sent him straight to bed. And as soon as he was sure that you were going to be okay, he cooperated."
"I want to sit up," I said.
"Fine," he said, and helped me into a sitting position. "Hungry?" he asked.
I consulted with my stomach. "A little," I admitted. "Maybe I should try eating something."
Sitting down on the bed beside me, Larry picked up the phone and talked to room service while I leaned back against the pillows. He hung up and stretched out beside me on top of the covers. "God, I’m tired," he groaned. "This has been a hell of a time."
"What time is it?" I asked. I couldn’t tell by the sky, since it was grey and overcast.
"About three pm."
"Good God," I said. "When did Jack and I get back here?"
"About eleven. The police finally took everyone away around one."
"Who was everyone, anyway?" I asked curiously.
"Okay," said Larry, counting them off on his fingers. "First, Cleo/Jessica/Sylvia. Sylvia is her real name, as far as we know."
"I know," I said, nodding. "I found that out later."
"Right. Then there was Twinett. Man, he’s a twerp. He doesn’t even have the courage to be a criminal. He whined all the way out of here – and even threatened to charge Jack with assault. The police laughed at him."
"Good," I said.
"And that Steve was involved. He appears to have been the all-purpose villain – bugged Jack’s room – "
"I remember!" I exclaimed. "He was doing some work in Jack’s suite the morning Jack arrived. And in the room next door the day of the accident."
"He also put a GPS tracer on your car and drove the van. Oh, and he was the shooter."
"No wonder he never had time for his maintenance chores," I said. "He was too busy being a bad guy."
"Yes, and no wonder he never got fired by Twinett for not doing his work properly. So anyway, he threw the gun out the window and tried to make a break for it through the kitchen, but your friend Vicky shoved a trolley full of tarts into his path, and he went down, covered with pastry, custard, and fruit. Then I believe the head chef kicked him."
"Good for Vicky," I murmured absently. There was something else on my mind.
"And they went to the cliff, Nell."
"Did they?" I whispered.
"He’s dead," said Larry gently.
"Thank God," I breathed. "I could never have faced him again. It was horrible, Larry. You wouldn’t believe what he said." Tears started to slide down my cheeks as I thought about it. Larry reached over and wiped the tears away.
"Jack told us," he said softly. "What a monster."
"Yes," I said. "Well, that’s it. It’s over. Does my mother know yet?"
"Yes, as next-of-kin she was informed first thing this morning. She should be here soon." There was discreet knock at the door, and Larry went to open it. He took the cart from whomever was there, and pushed it into the room. "Lots of food, Nell," he said. "Let’s nosh."
I drifted off again after some chicken soup and strawberries. The next time I woke up the room was darker, and this time it was Jack sitting by the window. I didn’t even move, but just whispered his name, and he was over to me in a moment, down on his knees beside the bed with his left hand grasping mine. He kissed me softly and smoothed my hair back from my forehead. "How are you feeling?" he asked.
"Better now," I said weakly. I looked at his right arm, all bandaged up again. "Larry told me your arm’s a mess."
He shrugged. "I’ll be fine," he said. He got up and perched on the edge of the bed, leaning over me.
It was then that door swung open and my mother walked in. "That god-damned selfish bastard," were her first words. Jack looked up in shock while I smothered a smile. Well, it was beginning to look like he was going to have to meet her sooner or later. He might as well plunge in at the deep end and get it over with.
She walked over to the bed. "You must be Jack. I’m Elinor." She held out her hand but dropped it when she saw his right arm in a sling. "How are you, Nell?" She bent over me briefly.
I struggled to sit up. Jack helped adjust the pillows while my mother put down her purse on the table by the window. "Nice view," she said. "Who the hell did he think he was?"
"Maybe I should go," said Jack hesitantly. I hadn’t warned him about my mother. How does one prepare someone for Elinor?
"No, don’t," she said with a sudden brilliant smile. "Mike and Larry have told me the whole story. I know all. I apologize for having an egotistical toad for a brother. He should have been smothered at birth. Seriously. It’s a good thing that our mother is dead, because this would have killed her. An old line, but unfortunately true."
"Please, mother," I said, wincing.
"Too loud, honey? Sorry, I forgot about your head," she said in a stagy whisper. "Should we leave you to rest?"
I considered the possibility that mother might leave the room without Jack. I knew that wouldn’t happen. So I said, "No, mother, stay, please. Just stop talking about it, okay? I don’t think that I can take it."
Jack sat down again beside me on the bed, and took my hand. "Nell’s been through quite a lot this week, Mrs Bannister."
"Ms Winston," I corrected him automatically, before mother could. "But call her Elinor. Right, mother?"
She nodded decisively. "Right. Nell, is there anything you need that I should get for you? I suppose that I should try to be nurturing, although right now I feel more like throttling someone. That god-damned egotistical murdering bastard."
"Mother, please," I protested.
"Fine, fine," she sighed. "Maybe I better leave you alone. This Carruthers says that he’ll give me a room. Not surprisingly, a few more guests than expected vacated today. Too much excitement, I guess."
"Let me go with you, Elinor," said Jack, rising to his feet, and giving my hand a squeeze before he let go. "I think that maybe Nell does need to be alone."
"Nell?" asked my mother, coming over and looking at me with some real concern.
"Jack’s right," I said reluctantly. I did hate to see him go, but my head was starting to feel funny again. "I think I’m going to need more rest."
"I’ll send Larry back in," she promised, bending over and giving me a gentle kiss on the forehead. "And Mike’s dying to talk to you too. Although he says that at least when you’re unconscious he can get a word in edgewise."
"That sounds like Mike, all right," I said. "Send them in for a sec, and then I’m going back to sleep."
Larry checked my pupils and said I’d be fine, and Mike just gave me a quick hug and a kiss and told me he loved me, and then they let me go back to sleep
I continued to receive my visitors for two more days like that. The doctor who came in to check on me a couple of times assured me that I was recovering nicely, and said not to push things. So I didn’t. My mother would stomp in and out every once in a while with some new evidence of her brother’s infamy to proclaim. Mike and Larry went back to Toronto on Wednesday afternoon. He phoned up his boss and explained that since he’d been a hero and caught a killer, he thought he deserved some time off, and got it.
Jim was in and out. He was busy, since Carruthers had decided to immediately promote him to assistant manager. We apologized to each other for our mutual suspicions, which had made him feel just as bad as me. He did, at least, relieve my mind about one thing that had been bothering me: if Len Montgomery wasn’t involved in the "organization", what had he been hinting about to Vicky?
Ah well, if nothing else Len had an over-inflated opinion of his own importance. His great criminal conspiracy was a plan to smuggle liquor across from the Ohio side of the lake on his sailboat. He was caught the day after the party with a hold full of bottles of American rye, and was out on the bail. Theatre in Port Burwell was still alive and well, and he was planning a musical about the Lake Erie rum-runners.
Vicky brought me some leftover tarts as a treat on Wednesday. She assured me that she’d stopped barfing. Sue came by too, beaming with joy. That’s a corny phrase, but it fit. It seemed that Carruthers, shaken by all of this, had taken the plunge and asked her to marry him, and she had accepted. Not many people get to marry for money and love, but I had a feeling that for Sue and the boys things were going to work out just fine.
Arthur Carruthers himself came to see me Thursday afternoon. I was watching a gardening show when he tapped at the door and opening it slightly, peeked in. "Can I come in?" he asked.
"Sure," I said, slightly flustered, picking up the clicker and turning off the television. He came and sat down in the "audience chair" as I thought of it, the comfy chair from the window embrasure which had been moved over so that whoever was talking to me could do so in comfort.
"Nell, you have been through a terrible experience," he said, leaning forward with real sympathy in his eyes.
"Yes, well..." I said, not sure of what to say in response.
"I, too, of course, have been betrayed," he continued. "I considered Robert Winston one of my best friends, and now I find that he was using my hotel as a convenient place to kill people. I was horrified," he said, and stopped abruptly.
I murmured something inarticulately. What could I say?
"Nell, I have an offer for you," he continued.
"An offer?" I asked blankly.
"You spoke to me once about what could be done in terms of gardening here. I want you to do it."
I closed my eyes for a moment, because my head had started to spin. "You want me to do what?" I asked weakly.
"Be my gardener. Please."
I opened my eyes again. He was sitting there with a confident smile on his face.
"I was planning on going to grad school this fall," I said helplessly.
"I can offer you a cottage to live in, an adequate salary – we can discuss details later – and the job of creating that perennial garden, and kitchen garden – hell, I’ll build you a greenhouse! You can take your horticulture diploma while working – Guelph isn’t that far, and so much can be done by correspondence – and in the meantime you can give Tintagel something else to be known for."
There was nothing else to say. "I’ll do it," I said weakly.
"Excellent!" he said, and got up and left, even before I could congratulate him on his impending marriage. And then I realized. If I was the kitchen gardener, I’d have to deal with Andy. God damn son of a bitch Andy. Oh well.
I was forced to take it easy for a week. My body forced me. Every time that I tried to do something relatively energetic like, say, walk across the room, my head would start to swim. So I spent a lot of time not doing much of anything. Jack and I spent much of that time together, just sitting or lying around together. Let’s face it, both of us were in pretty rough shape. Every time we got "excited", his arm would flare up or my head would start acting up, or both, so we settled for lots of cuddling. I’d wake up from an unscheduled nap that had started out as the two of us lying down watching televison to find him deeply asleep beside me. It was strangely disturbing to be so trustful of this man whom, really, I hardly knew.
One night I woke up to find the room in complete darkness and Jack’s head pillowed on my shoulder. I shifted slightly, as my arm had fallen asleep underneath him, and that woke him up too. He whispered, "Awake?"
"Just now," I responded, moving so that my head was on his shoulder (the left one; I was very careful of his right arm). His lips brushed my forehead. "Jack?" I asked
"Mmm?"
"I need to tell you something."
"This sounds serious," he murmured, putting his arm around and holding me closer.
I was glad that it was dark so he wouldn’t see me blushing. Really, this was ridiculous. "You know, at the St Charles – " I stopped. Why was this so hard?
"Yes?" he said encouragingly.
I plunged in. "I remember you very well from then. In fact, I – I sort of spent the whole summer being crazy about you." It was out.
He chuckled softly. "Honestly, pet, I had no idea, if it makes you feel better. Seriously. I remember the spaghetti, but that’s it. Really."
"So I didn’t make an obvious fool of myself?"
"Not to me, you didn’t. I can’t speak for anyone else, of course. For all I know they could have been laughing at you, but who cares about them? Just as well that you didn’t try anything on back then. I was involved hot and heavy with Annette – the one who helped me get the Grump going later that year. I wouldn’t have had much to say to you then. It’s all worked out in the end, though, hasn’t it?" He then proceeded to demonstrate how well things were going, but then of course he touched my head in the wrong damn place, and his arm got wrenched the wrong damn way, and we both swore a bit, and we kissed softly again, and settled back down and eventually went back to sleep. Which goes to show how bad a shape we were in.
After a week I moved up to a motel in London where my mother was staying while things got settled about Uncle Robert’s stuff. She and I, along with my brother Bobby, were his principal heirs, but not surprisingly none of us wanted to benefit from it. On the other hand, there were some items of a family nature in his house that had to be dealt with, mostly photographs, family records, and some heirlooms. The police, of course, spent some time going through his place with a fine-tooth comb looking for evidence and links to the international organization that he’d been involved with, but once they were done it was my mother’s task to sort through his belongings looking for those things we wanted to salvage from the wreckage of his life, and I was there to help her.
This was damned depressing. There far too many reminders of the man whom we had genuinely loved, unaware of what he really was like under that charming surface. I found it especially hard when we came upon a cache of home-made presents from the young me to my beloved uncle, treated with the loving care that they deserved.
I was disappointed when Jack had to return in a hurry to England just after I left Tintagel. There was something wrong with his grandmother, and he was needed. Our goodbye ended up being very brief. It took place at the bus station in London just before he boarded the airport express. I’m bad at goodbyes to begin with, and there could hardly be a less romantic place than the bus station. And how do you say goodbye to someone whom you really really like but whom you actually barely know? As it was, we had left far too much up in the air. We gave each other a quick hug and a kiss, and he said, "I’ll be back soon." And with a flash of his lazy smile he was gone.
The next afternoon my mother looked out the window and asked, "Where the hell did that come from?"
"What?" I asked, putting down a pile of family photos that I had been going through and coming over to stand next to her at Uncle Robert’s office window. She was peering through the venetian blinds at something outside.
"That," she said. "Who would park that thing in the drive? And how the hell are we going to get out?"
Between my mother’s car and the road, in Uncle Robert’s private driveway, was a truck. Nothing fancy, just your run-of-the-mill blue pick-up, maybe three or four years old. "I’ll go down and see what I can do," I sighed.
What I thought that I could do I didn’t know. I had no clue how to start to look for the idiot who had left it there, so I went over and stood on my tippy-toes and peeked in the driver’s window to see if I could get any ideas.
There was a big box on the passenger seat, wrapped in cream paper with a big gold tulle bow. I was starting to get an idea about whose truck it was. The door was unlocked, and when I opened it, I saw that the keys were in the ignition, with a pewter keychain shaped like a garden spade dangling down.
I sat down in the driver’s seat and pulled on the ribbon around the box, and the bow was gone. I lifted off the lid, and there, wrapped in silver tissue paper, was my Titania dress, a little worse for the watering it had endured, but expertly cleaned and pressed. The note was on top. I’d never seen the writing before.
Nell–
Mike said that the costume place refused to take back the dress; I think that you might be able to find something to do with it. It is still beautiful. The truck is less beautiful, but if you are to be a gardener you need something to haul manure in.
Please wait for me because I will be back. Don’t take any trains without me.
Jack
I wasn’t going to be taking any trains. I had found the place that I wanted to stay.
Here are some pretty pictures from my home... NOT taken right now! They are from November. Right now we are in the grip of winter weather. Once I can appreciate the snow (as in, when I am off on holidays and don't have to worry about driving through it), I will get out the snowshoes, go off on a walk through the orchard and woods, and take some nice shots of the snow for the frozen-precipitation challenged of you out there.
This is just too much of a coincidence. Yesterday I was out in my garden, yanking grass, and noticed with pleasure that my Shirley poppies were about to bloom. I am a major fan of Shirley poppies, and it has taken me 4 years to get them properly established as self-seeding annuals in our new home. Early this morning, I looked out, and lo and behold, the first poppy, just one, had bloomed. It is the fifth anniversary of the death of my husband's mother, Shirley.
Posts
