Deciding it would be more fun to look through the book with Lane, Darling put it on the table and donned his jacket to make the trip to the barn, where he spent the next hour chopping wood and conveying it to the pile next to the Franklin stove. Then he went downstairs into the basement to shovel some coal into the furnace. Having engaged, as he saw it, in these manly activities, Darling stood in the hallway looking out toward the door. The weather really was beastly. He was about to turn back to put the kettle on when he saw Lane’s car pull up to the gate. Things were looking up.

  “When are you proposing to do their laundry?” he asked when he had heard her plan.

  “I’d better do it more or less now. Who knows when the new teacher will come,” she said, as she hung up her wet jacket.

  “You heard Bertolli. They’re unlikely to post a new teacher till January. Come, I’ve produced a fresh pile of wood, put the kettle on, and am ready to try to do something really useful, like learn to make shortbread from the cookbook I found in that ice house you call an attic.”

  “Thus shattering forever any impression of the dour inspector,” Lane said, smiling. “I’ve done whatever I can with the place. Oh. I’ve also brought Miss Scott’s two suitcases here, because who knows when she’ll get out of hospital. They’re in the boot. There’s no hurry now. I’d kill for a cup of tea. And while we’re having tea, I can tell you about the very strange thing I found that might solve the mystery of the blow to Miss Scott’s head. Or might not. Right. Well, I’m changing out of these clothes. Have tea and newspaper at the ready. And is there any of that cake left?”

  Settled at the table, with her hands around a mug of tea, Lane related her finding of the blood on the corner edge of the dressing table.

  “It’s a good question. How does this alter the situation?” Darling mused. “It suggests the assailant may not have had such murderous intentions. Perhaps she got in his way, tried to get him to stop, maybe grabbed his arm, and he pushed her away. The fact of the matter is, if she doesn’t remember something, we’re probably never really going to know. The aggravating part is that we have no idea if something was taken, if that was the intention of the attack on the cottage in the first place.”

  “I wondered if it was the note writer. In fact, it even crossed my mind that she wasn’t getting married at all, but just running away, only she left it too late. If the note writer did it, I think you’ll agree that it’s more likely to have been a man hounding her than a woman. Poor Miss Scott! She’s trying to recover while the police are ghoulishly hanging about waiting for her to be able to tell them what happened.”

  “Are we ghoulish, do you think? More ghoulish than, say, you, excited because you’ve found a blood-stained dressing table? As you know, I had a call about Miss Scott this morning from Terrell because she’d collapsed after reading the paper. I perused our copy of yesterday’s paper, and Terrell found one as well at the station. He just telephoned to say he thought he might know what it was. And you know, I think I won’t tell you, and see if you can guess. I thought he was quite clever, actually.”

  “But I bet you didn’t tell him so,” Lane said.

  “Certainly not. It doesn’t do to swell the heads of underlings.”

  Lane had, of course, guessed, but then, Darling reasoned, she was seeing little Samuel every day. Now they sat, tea, sandwiches, and the last of the cake consumed, fulfilling their original plan for the day, reading by the fire. She put her book face down on the arm of her chair. “Oh, I meant to ask you, when you went to the cottage that first time, were the mattresses on straight? Only I just couldn’t imagine someone tearing a place apart looking for something and not going straight for the mattresses. People always hide things under mattresses.”

  Darling skewed his mouth sideways in an effort of remembering and then shook his head. “I know Ames looked under them to see if any notes had been shoved there, but that was after our initial visit. I don’t think they were askew, now that you mention it, though I concede your point. Perhaps he found whatever he was looking for before he needed to look under mattresses.”

  “Of course, you’re right. That’s just what I came to as well. I just thought it odd it wasn’t the first place they’d look.” Lane took up her book, and then put it down again. “You know, after hearing David’s story yesterday evening, I now imagine the whole road is littered with dead deer. I wonder what happens to them all.”

  “It’s quite a serious business,” Darling said. “People have been killed hitting wild animals, especially at night. They shoot out of nowhere and there’s no time to react.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Lane said, “it will make it harder to find the car, if there are so many out there banged up by animals.” She sighed. “There are so many loose ends.” She cleared a space on the little table between their chairs. “You have Scott over here, recovering from a bang on the head and a stroke. And somewhere out of the picture you presumably have a missing Keeling. It is difficult to imagine they are not related, but then we learn that Keeling may have left before the attack on Scott. However, it’s quite conceivable that she only left to meet up with her confederate and returned again with him to attack Miss Scott.”

  “I consider this an unhealthy occupation,” Darling observed. “Then what?”

  “We have artifacts, if you will, all around the business. There are poison-pen notes, one at school and five found in the stove at the cottage. Can we assume more? A campaign of intimidation by someone? I think we can. But against whom? And then we have a revolver hidden at the school, and, if young Samuel is right, several sightings of a car that seems to be watching the school, well, not the car, obviously, someone in it. The same car that was at the house on the Friday, again according to your Samuel. What am I missing, so far?”

  Darling rubbed his chin. “You have, and I think it can only be irrelevant and an actual genuine coincidence— something I don’t allow for normally—the fact of Samuel’s father being killed on the highway.”

  “I mean, if I were to draw these out on a map, there would be disparate and possibly entirely unconnected bits and pieces, and a raft of questions. Who was in the car? Who attacked Scott? Same person? What were they looking for? Where did Keeling go, and why? Was she the attacker? Or is she a victim, kidnapped? And where is Scott’s supposed fiancé? Oh, and not incidentally, how reliable are Scott and young Samuel? She’s recovering from a concussion and a stroke, and he’s nine years old. Do we know, by the way, when he saw that car? Because if it was Friday, someone could have taken Miss Keeling away that night, and could it be the same person returning later to complete the job on Scott?”

  Darling was making a move preparatory to speaking when Lane added, “And why was Miss Keeling’s room not messed about? And there’s the question of why the assailant didn’t look under the mattresses if he was looking for something valuable. Finally, is there any significance to the bathroom mirror being cracked?”

  Darling mused, “I’m not sure Samuel actually said he saw the car there on the Friday. I’m wondering now if I assumed it. Damn. He’s our only witness to a car being at the cottage, and he’s no doubt in a bad way over his father. Another thing to add to the hopper: Miss Scott has not mentioned in any of her interviews that she was going to marry. In fact, she said at least once that she was going home to Manitoba to help her mother, so your theory about her doing a runner might hold water, perhaps to get away from whoever was persecuting her with notes, or worse.”

  “When you say ‘or worse,’ what are you thinking of?”

  “Well, I mean, someone is stalking her, you could say. If it was a man, had he already attacked her before and she just hasn’t been able to tell us?”

  “Yes, but I say, wouldn’t she have warned poor Miss Keeling?” Lane asked.

  “Yes, she could have. Perhaps she did. She can’t seem to remember much, and Miss Keeling is gone, so no one to tell us. But equally she could have been ashamed of it, feeling somehow she’d brought it on herself.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Wednesday, December 3

  MISS KEELING WOULDN’T HAVE NOTICED, except that Samuel was staying late at school again, finding reasons to drag out his departure long past that of the other children. She had been so close to asking him, but then she thought she really knew. His father would be away at work on the Nelson ferry, and Samuel would be alone until he got back. Under those circumstances he would almost certainly be too proud to complain. She stood now and watched Samuel walk down the road, eating the extra scone she had brought for just this purpose. Shaking her head and resolving that she ought to talk to someone about him, she was just turning away to prepare for the next day’s classes when she saw the car.

  It was backing slowly down the hill. Samuel stopped and was looking at it, and then it disappeared from her sight, and Samuel walked on.

  She was not prepared for the flood of panic that assailed her so powerfully that she had to sit down and hold the edge of the desk. It was nonsense. Someone lost. She tried to focus on the details of the car to still the rampant beating of her heart. It was an older model. Dark blue, maybe, or black. Some sort of red insignia on the front. The real trouble was that she’d seen it before. It wasn’t someone lost. It had been stopped at the top of the road to the cottage. When? Two days before? She’d given it no thought then. She’d seen it when she was carrying wood from the shed, and she had dismissed it completely as belonging to a local. She certainly didn’t recognize all the cars of the parents yet. People were always pausing at roads looking for addresses because they were so poorly marked. She looked around the classroom trying to restore a sense of the normal. She would mark papers, prepare lessons, write on the board, make sure the fire was damped, and drive home to where Miss Scott was preparing supper. They would chat about the children, and she would imagine what it must be like to be leaving to get married. And she would close her eyes, happy about her assignment here at the Balfour school. Happy, free at last. Her own woman. After all, no one had ever come, just as Mrs. Franklin had predicted.

  It was useless. She got up abruptly and paced.

  She should have asked for an assignment in the far north, or in the Peace River country. Now look at her! So nervy that she had got a revolver, which she had never told Miss Scott about. She could never use it, she knew, but she had bought it before she left the Island, thinking it would make her feel safe. She would bring it the next day, stow it somewhere secure. She walked around the classroom, opening and shutting the desk drawers. No. A child could find it. In the kitchen she saw the high cupboards. In there. If the car came back, if someone got out of the car, she would just have time to get it.

  SUNDAY UNFOLDED IN a way Darling had always imagined Sundays might, if one was with someone one loved. A slow getting up, a shivering run downstairs to heave some coal into the furnace, and a return to bed until it took effect. Sitting in the kitchen in thick flannel dressing gowns, looking out at the change from the icy rain of the previous days back to snow, with thick mugs of coffee in hand and bacon cooking.

  They had perused the Fannie Farmer cookbook and found pancakes, which were now staying warm in the oven. Lane dropped eggs into the frying pan and then rummaged around in the cupboard until she found the can of treacle.

  “At last, a use for this! Mabel tells me it is a must in ginger cake, but I’ve yet to attempt that. Theirs is so delicious I’m afraid to try.”

  “Should we have dressed for breakfast?” Darling asked, with the air of a man who has no intention of budging.

  “I am dressed,” Lane objected, pushing her auburn hair away from her face with a spatula-laden hand.

  “Do that again, and you won’t be for long,” he said. He wondered when he might tire of her cheekbones and that fall of hair.

  The remains of breakfast before them, Lane said, “Angela and I are going up the hill to look at that house and see how the builders are getting on. Want to come along?”

  “That’s all right. I’ll do the washing up and keep the home fires burning. And I have to finish this book. It’s due back at the library this week.” He waggled the Steinbeck at her.

  “I HAVEN’T HEARD a thing,” Angela said, coming down the stairs from the porch, “so I expect the workers are gone till tomorrow and we can have a good look. We can get to the road through the back here.” The Bertolli collies had stationed themselves, one in front, one behind, apparently bent on herding Angela and Lane through the yard to the road and up to the construction site.

  Snow had begun to fall in tiny exploratory flakes, and the sight of it lifted Lane’s spirits to no end. She had loved the long snowy landscapes of her childhood home in Latvia. When she had moved to England to attend Oxford it was, she reflected, what she most missed. It was an irony, she always thought, that all her English relations living in Latvia idealized and missed the English summers. Here in King’s Cove, she thought, she could have both.

  As they walked, Angela asked, “Are you still enjoying your stint as a teacher? You must have a real talent for it,” she added. “The children love you.”

  Lane smiled. “And I love them. It’s really my first experience with children, and I don’t think I expected it to be such fun. Although, I was thinking how hard it is in some ways. I don’t just mean trying to sort out all the different levels of lessons and trying to be an expert on everything. It’s the emotional part. I think I’m finding it’s very easy to get attached, and that’s mostly lovely, because they are lovely children, but when one of them has an unhappy home life, and you can see it right on his face . . . I don’t know. I feel quite powerless and wish so much I could help. Like little Samuel. Not only was he abandoned occasionally, but I’m certain he’d been struck. And now on top of it, his father has died. It’s heartbreaking.”

  “Absolutely dreadful! The boys tell me that he’s staying with Gabriella, so that must help. The Benjamins are awfully good people. I know I shouldn’t speak ill and all that, but that Gaskell was a dreadful excuse for a human being. Nobody liked him. Last year at the Dominion Day dance he got absolutely pie-eyed and made extremely loud, rude remarks to poor Miss Scott. Loud enough for the whole place to hear.”

  “Oh? What sort of remarks?”

  “I think I put it right out of my mind. I just remember he was disgusting. Honestly, a more blameless and self-sacrificing woman would be hard to find!”

  At the top of the road, the dogs abandoned their charges and ran into the yard, which was still full of lumber and tools under canvas tarpaulins, and sniffed earnestly at the new smells.

  “It’s going to be very nice,” Lane observed. “It looks like they might add another floor. That will lift that gloomy overhanging roof that keeps the sitting room dark all year long.”

  They followed the dogs into the yard and around the back. The kitchen had been enhanced by the addition of new larger windows and a porch.

  Peering in the window, Lane exclaimed, “Oh, too bad!”

  “What?” Angela asked, joining in the peering.

  “There used to be a nice wood floor in the kitchen that a little sanding could have really spruced up. They’ve covered it up with linoleum.”

  “Yes, but quite nice linoleum,” Angela said. “It’s a very pretty green, that floral sort of design. It’ll be handy in the kitchen.”

  “Trust an artist to find the bright side. They have a fancy electric stove. Now then.” Lane pulled away from the window and looked around the yard. “What have they done with the old wood-burning number that was there? I mean, the house was a ghastly mess when I was in here last spring. No one had been in it since before the Great War, but I would have thought a wood stove could still have some use.” She gave a cursory look around the yard, and then wondered if they’d simply thrown it in the woods behind the house. She stood back and looked at the house. Even the work it was undergoing seemed unlikely to lift the pall of sadness she associated with the house. “It’s still hard not to think of this as a place of tragedy, what with that little child.”

  “I suppose you’re right, but what house hasn’t had someone die in it, when you think about it? Our cabin already had most of the additions when we bought it a few years ago, but it was once an old settlers’ cabin. People must have died in droves there.” Angela pushed her hands into her pockets and started back toward the road.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Lane said, “though ‘droves’ might be an overstatement. Even if whoever is building it is only planning to use it for the summer, I hope it’s a cheerful, happy family that can change the fortunes of the sad place.”

  “Now who’s being an optimist? It’s all right for you. You’re two miles away. You won’t hear the fast cars driving up and down the roads, taking the noisy family you so fondly envision to the lake to swim and have drunken late-night picnics. Where have the bloody dogs got to?” Angela turned back toward the house, calling, “Lassie? Sandy? Come on. We’re going home.”

  Lane, who could hear the dogs barking at something, waited on the road, looking up past the trees into the sky, where the first tentative flakes of snow had been replaced by larger, fluffier models that promised a lovely white cover over everything. She sighed with contentment, thinking of nestling down by the stove for the rest of the day with her lessons for the children. She turned at the sound of Angela’s voice.

  “What on earth are you up to? Come away, you beastly animals!”

  Lane started toward the house, meeting Angela and the two dogs, who seemed reluctant to leave. “What is it?”

  “They were digging and sniffing along the edge of the house there. No doubt a dead something, speaking of things dying. I’m sure the work on the house has scared out all the rats and God knows what living there. Why will dogs go after carcasses? It’s disgusting.”