Читать книгу The Wild Child - Judith Bowen - Страница 10

THUMP!

Agnes Klassen winced as she smacked the lump of pastry with the side of her rolling pin. She didn’t usually treat pie dough like this. “So what’s your daddy going to say when he hears all that?”

The child’s eyes were big and brown. “You going to tell him, Auntie Aggie?”

The housekeeper’s glance slid sideways. “You think I should?” She wasn’t sure what to make of Fanny’s news. The girl had spent the past half hour chattering about her new friend at the other end of the island, the woman Aggie’s husband, Matthew, caretaker of the Lord estate, had mentioned shortly after her arrival ten days ago. Matthew had said the visitor was harmless, just someone using the old woman’s house for a holiday, and Aggie believed him.

Fanny was thrilled about the lipstick she’d tried, the magazines she’d looked at, even the contents of the visitor’s fridge. Poor child! All alone and no playmates her own age. Was it any wonder she was starved for anything new?

Fanny said Silas had come looking for her, but she’d run through the visitor’s back door and away through the forest, managing to get home first. The incident hadn’t been mentioned at dinner the previous evening. Silas, of course, could be extremely absentminded. He had plenty to think about. Besides, he didn’t tell his housekeeper everything, did he?

“I guess so,” the child responded slowly, sticking her thumbs into the pastry Agnes had given her. “’Less I tell him first,” she added quickly, then nodded, as though pleased with her decision. “How ’bout that? Maybe I better, since he was chasing me ’n’ Bruno most of the way home. It was fun!”

With renewed enthusiasm, she began pressing her pastry into the five-inch tart pan Aggie reserved for Fanny’s pies. “I know!” Her face was bright. “I’ll tell him at the party today.”

Aggie rolled out one quarter of the dough in front of her. She was making two pies this morning, one for their evening meal and one for the freezer. Both Silas and Matthew were inordinately fond of blueberry pie. What man wasn’t? Aggie smiled at Fanny. You couldn’t stay mad at the little rascal, she thought. No, you couldn’t. Fanny had her—and Matthew and Silas—twisted around her pinkie finger, always had.

Fanny’s pie was for the party she was having that afternoon, presumably for her father and Bruno and the squirrel Aggie had never seen but knew all about—even that it went by the name of Kelly. A dog and a squirrel! Fanny needed more people in her life, the dear motherless waif.

Also on the menu were raw vegetables and cheese dip, Aggie’s suggestion, and toast and cake and soft drinks, Fanny’s request. Silas didn’t believe in feeding children a lot of sugar, so that would mean carrot cake and cream cheese icing and juice boxes, not pop. Sometimes Aggie wondered where a man like Silas, who’d surely never expected to be a father, got so many definite notions about childrearing.

Actually, now that she thought about it, Aggie was glad Fanny had met the young woman staying in Doris Bonhomme’s old house, although she disapproved of the way it had come about. She didn’t like Fanny and that dog of hers skulking about the island, spying on folks. A five-year-old, no matter how clever for her age, should not be roaming around freely, talking to birds and chipmunks, hair uncombed, not even properly dressed half the time.

But you couldn’t argue with Silas Lord! A more stubborn man had never lived. Aggie ought to know; she’d helped raise him herself, as housekeeper to Silas’s parents many years ago. Of course, in those days, she’d been constantly busy, cooking and cleaning for the Lord household both on Liberty Island and at their home in West Vancouver, as well as raising Ivor, their own boy. Matthew had done the outdoor work, still did although he was pushing seventy now.

They both were. She was sixty-eight and feeling every minute of it some days. She sighed and wiped one cheek with a floury wrist, aware of the aches that had crept up over the past few years. Silas was thirty-two, just a little younger than their Ivor, all grown-up, too, and in an assisted-living home in Gibsons, making his way, such as it was, in the world….

As a boy, young Silas had been as cheeky and charming as his small daughter was today.

“What’s a good time for my party, Auntie?” Fanny stared at the wall clock, pretending to read it, a pencil crayon in one hand and a piece of paper in front of her on the table.

“How about two o’clock?” Aggie suggested. “That way you won’t spoil your supper.”

“The big hand is on the twelve for an ‘o’clock,’ right?” Fanny took a fresh pencil crayon, orange, and drew a large circle on the piece of paper in front of her. The child didn’t really know how to tell time, but she understood about the big hand and the small hand. Aggie had watched Silas coach her patiently, right there at the big wooden table in the kitchen, going through the A-B-C’s, teaching her to tell time, name the days of the week, tie her own shoes. He’d started music lessons recently on the old out-of-tune player piano in the parlor—Aggie had often heard her plunking out “Old Macdonald” after breakfast—and he’d taught her to swim and play croquet.

“And the little hand is on the?” The housekeeper waited, floury hands held high as she crossed to the sink.

“Two!” Fanny triumphantly held up two fingers, then added a 2 to her drawing, not exactly in the right spot, but close enough.

“And what is that you’re drawing, honey?”

“It’s a ’vitation,” Fanny said earnestly. “You know—that you send out? This gives when. I’m going to draw my little gypsy house for the place. When you have a party, you have to send ’vitations, don’t you?”

“Well, of course you do,” Aggie agreed, rinsing her hands in a basin in the sink. She wondered where a squirrel got mail. Fanny’s “little gypsy house” was the caravan playhouse Silas had built for her under the trees in the old orchard. The girl wanted for nothing money could buy. “Anything else you’ll need?”

“Some wool,” the girl returned promptly. “I need a ball of that nice yellow wool you’re knitting me a sweater with. Can I have some?”

“For decorations?” Aggie reached for a kitchen towel, mystified, doubly so as she observed Fanny’s sudden self-conscious, rather evasive expression.

“Well…” The girl nibbled on the end of the pencil crayon for a few minutes, examining her drawing. Then she looked up, dark eyes dancing. “Something like that!”

EVA SLEPT amazingly well, considering the events of the previous afternoon, and it was nearly ten when she awoke to the sound of shingles banging on the roof again.

After breakfast, she dragged the cumbersome wooden ladder from the shed to the house and climbed up to drive in a few nails. There was a musty stack of shingles in the shed, of various patterns, as well as other odds and ends. Pieces of lumber, screws and nails in jam tins, wire screening, rusted tools of various kinds. Eva wondered if Doris had done all her own repairs. She was coming to a new appreciation of what it took to live here all alone, as Doris had for so long.

At least the riddle of the child and dog was solved, and Eva could focus on the task ahead of her, tidying up Doris’s affairs. Fanny obviously lived with her father, Silas Lord, at the other end of the island. Simple. There were Lords using the old family place. She should’ve been told. Why hadn’t Doris said anything?

“Uncle” Matthew, Eva’d been informed, was the caretaker; “Auntie” Aggie was his wife, the housekeeper. Fanny’s father hadn’t offered much more than that before he’d turned abruptly, at her repeated refusal of his help, and headed back down the path.

She’d hobbled home and managed to dig the briar out but her heel was still sore. What a strange man. What a strange child! Eva still wasn’t sure she believed Fanny and her family were actually living on Liberty Island year-round. A summer could seem like a very long time to a young child. Spending the summer here alone, probably bored, could account for Fanny’s interest in Doris’s house. Of course, little girls were interested in lipstick and jewelry and dress-up, but the contents of fridges? Old broken mirrors? Magazine covers?

She’d been more than inquisitive, positively nosy. In a way, Eva admired her brashness. Ask and ye shall receive…. A contrast to what Eva remembered of her own childhood. She’d been on the shy side, polite and accommodating—too polite, Doris had always said, teasing both her and her mother, Felicity, so inaptly named, a woman who’d had more than her share of unhappiness in her short life.

Eva finished sorting through the sheet music and other musical paraphernalia in the so-called music room, a glass-enclosed room that looked to the sea on the south and had French doors leading to the patio on the north. Instead of a swim, she decided to go for a run along the beach. She’d be ready for a late lunch when she returned.

Eva ran in shorts, a tank top and sneakers. The pebbly beach, interspersed with grassy areas and patches of sand, was too rough to run in bare feet, even if she hadn’t had a sore heel. The breeze was welcome, light against her overheated face, and as she approached the house on her way back, she slowed to a brisk walk, reaching up to whip off the scarf that held back her hair.

Whew! Looked like another summer scorcher of a day. A shower, a sandwich and then—

What was that? A square of colored paper lay just inside the door of the house. The door was always unlocked; Eva wasn’t even sure there was a lock. What was there to keep out? Just Andy and the rabbits that nibbled Doris’s garden…

Eva stooped to pick up the envelope, and smiled as she turned it over. It was clearly handmade, a little crooked and dripping with glue. From Fanny. Eva opened it and a small loop of yellow wool fell out.

She bent to retrieve it. Inside the envelope was a much creased piece of paper, which Eva unfolded, her smile widening.

There were no words. Just a drawing of a playhouse of some sort, with a table and chairs outside and various kinds of food on the table—a huge cake, drinks with straws. Nothing was in proportion; it was a typical four- or five-year-old’s drawing. A clock face, drawn in orange, showed two o’clock. It was just past one now. There was a patch of glue with telltale yellow wisps caught up in it next to the rendition of a clock face. Eva glanced at the yellow loop on her wrist, the yarn that had fallen out of the envelope. Aha!

Then she turned to gaze toward the creek that separated the Bonhommes’ from the Lords’. A yellow loop waved gently in the breeze, suspended from a bush on the far side of the creek.

While she’d been gone, someone had been very busy….